Getting in-early

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primary schools and earlyintervention

getting in early:

2008getting in early: prim

ary schools and early intervention

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The Smith InstituteThe Smith Institute, founded in the memory of the late Rt. Hon. John Smith, is an independent think tank that undertakes research, education and events. Our charitable purpose is educational in regard to the UK economy in its widestsense. We provide a platform for national and international discussion on a widerange of public policy issues concerning social justice, community, governance,enterprise, economy, trade, and the environment.

The Centre for Social JusticeThe Centre for Social Justice aims to put social justice at the heart of British politics. Our policy development is rooted in the wisdom of those working to tackle Britain’s deepest social problems and the experience of those whose lives have been affected by poverty. We consult nationally and internationally, especially with charities and social enterprises who are the the champions of the welfare society.

Every Child A Chance TrustThe Every Child a Chance Trust aims to unlock the educational potential of sociallydisadvantaged children through the development and promotion of evidence-based, early intervention programmes.

The Trust was established in 2007. It grew out of the outstandingly successfulEvery Child a Reader project, which showed that with the right intervention it is possible to tackle the literacy difficulties which blight many children’s lives. This three-year £10m scheme was funded by a partnership of businesses andcharitable trusts with matched funding from government.

The Trust was established to build on the power of this partnership, to transformthe lives of individuals, document the long-term impact of early interventions oncommunities and prove the economic case for early investment – and as a resultsecure pick up of the charity’s programmes at a national and local level.

KPMG Foundation The focus of the KPMG Foundation is on education and social projects for the disadvantaged and under privileged, with particular emphasis on unlocking thepotential of children and young people, up to 30 years of age, who for primarilysocial reasons have not fulfilled their educational potential.

In particular, the Foundation supports four distinct groups within this broadumbrella of ‘disadvantage’: refugees, young offenders, children and young peoplewho have been in care , and children and young people with literacy difficulties.

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T H E S M I T H I N S T I T U T E



getting in early:

Published by the Smith Institute and the Centre for Social Justice

ISBN 1 905370 41 5

This report represents the views of the authors and not those of the publishers.

© The Smith Institute and the Centre for Social Justice November 2008

This timely monograph follows the recent report by the Smith Institute and The Centre for Social Justice, Early Intervention: Good Parents, Great Kids, BetterCitizens (September 2008). With the support of Every Childa Chance Trust and the KPMG Foundation, it offers furtherevidence of how early intervention, followed through frompre-school years to primary school years, can break theintergenerational cycle of under achievement and multipledeprivation. As with the first report, this collaborationoffers a cross-party perspective and reaches across a range of professions and disciplines.

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Contents

Introductions • Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP, Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice and

Conservative MP, for Chingford and Woodford Green• Graham Allen MP, Chair of One Nottingham and Labour MP for Nottingham North• David Laws MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families

and Liberal Democrat MP for Yeovil

Chapter 1: Why we need to target four- to eight-year-oldsJean Gross, Director of the Every Child a Chance Trust

Chapter 2: How speech, language and communication are linked to social disadvantageJohn Bercow MP, Conservative MP for Buckingham, Virginia Beardshaw, ChiefExecutive of I CAN, and Anita Kerwin-Nye, Director of Communications at I CAN

Chapter 3: The need for a focus on literacy and numeracy Jean Gross

Chapter 4: Developing social and emotional skills in schools to help combat disadvantage Professor Katherine Weare, Emeritus Professor at the University of Southampton

Chapter 5: Effective parenting interventions – breaking the cycle of disadvantage by helping troubled families Professor Frances Gardner, Professor of Child and Family Psychology in the Department of Social Policy & Social Work at the University of Oxford

Chapter 6: Educational mobility, attitudes and aspirations during the primary school yearsDr Lee Elliot Major, Research Director at the Sutton Trust

Chapter 7: Tomorrow begins today – bridging the gap between the fortunateand the forgotten Charlotte Leslie, Editor of Crossbow and of the Bow Group’s Invisible Nation series, and Chris Skidmore, Former Chairman of the Bow Group

Conclusions • Graham Allen MP• John Bercow MP • Jean Gross

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Introduction 1Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP, Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice and Conservative MP for Chingford and Woodford Green

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.Michelangelo

In writing an introduction to this pamphlet about making the most of children’s primaryschool years and intervening where necessary to help all children fulfil their potential, I feel as if I have come full circle. The first publication in this series of collaborative projects (in which the Centre for Social Justice is partnering the Smith Institute) was written to highlight a key truth that seized me when chairing the Social Justice Policy Group: the need to intervene as early as possible in order to break the circle of disadvantage in a child’s life.

The Social Justice Policy Group’s two major publications, Breakdown Britain andBreakthrough Britain, looked at five intersecting pathways to poverty: educational failure,family breakdown, serious personal debt, addiction and economic dependency. (They alsoemphasised the serious partnering role the voluntary sector can and must play in tacklingthe root causes of disadvantage.) One of the key threads running through both reportswas the extent to which children’s life chances tend to be tightly prescribed by the circumstances into which they are born.

When writing our educational failure sections, this became especially apparent.Breakdown Britain stated that: “Our poorest children suffer disproportionately becausetheir families have little choice but to accept the pitfalls of the current system.” Childrenfrom disadvantaged backgrounds are five times more likely to fail academically than theirpeers, with the knock-on effect that 73% of young offenders describe their academicattainment as nil.

When committing ourselves to actual policy recommendations, in the final reportBreakthrough Britain, our research impressed upon us the need for early intervention and support for children and families both at pre-school level and at primary school, as“disadvantaged children need to have a love of learning fostered within them from asearly an age as possible so they can build academic skills alongside vital practical andsocial skills”.

One contributor to this pamphlet starkly illustrates the extremely high intergenerationalpersistence of difficulties in basic skills: in one study 60% of children in the lowest


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1 Moser, C A Fresh Start: Improving Literacy & Numeracy (Department for Education & Employment, 1999)

reading attainment group at age 10 had parents with low literacy levels, while only 2%had parents with high literacy scores.1

Our consideration of educational failure drew us back into the families to which school-children return every day – they spend only 15% of their time in school – as family background, cultural factors and material needs are the most significant influences upontheir educational outcomes. It also drew us back in time, to look at the way the child hadbeen shaped before ever setting foot in a school playground, and we concluded that helping parents before they were even engaged in nursery-stage education could significantly improve children’s potential to attain. But this insight does not discount the role that formal education can and must play in tackling disadvantage.

As Jean Gross states in chapter one:

… the early school years … represents the last critical window of opportunity in whichchange is possible. Research on how to tackle the early signs of antisocial behaviourthrough parenting programmes … shows that intervention when children are betweenfour and eight years old will have the greatest effect. Evidence on effective ways ofaddressing the literacy and numeracy problems often associated with social deprivation… shows that remedial action at 11 is too late.

What came through repeatedly in our research was the importance of involving the family when seizing these opportunities. We came across a visionary social worker, SimonLangley, jointly employed by an innovative council in Milton Keynes and a federation of18 schools, 16 of which are primary schools. His brief is to work to the Every Child Mattersagenda, specifically at very early intervention levels, and he has been freed to work in a wholly preventive way with parents. It is easy to overlook the radical nature of thisapproach – social workers we consulted with described the hunger they had to work further upstream and to pre-empt the results of dysfunction they could see in the families they served, but workloads and a working culture dictated that problems had to be full-blown before they could be tackled.

Simon Langley makes a distinction between early labelling and early intervention, saying:

… professionals see a “problem”, put in resources to deal with it, but often the problemhas been assessed in a time limited window, in a context divorced from the other systems(wider family, community, social life etc) and the resulting labelling can escalate


professionals’ negative view of the family and cause a snowballing effect of unmeritedintervention.

He is a champion of universal provision, projects that build social capital, a sense of community and belonging around schools, so that parents from across the spectrum aregenuinely enabled to feel part of the social fabric. He uses FAST (Families and SchoolsTogetherTM) programmes to change the learning climate. These programmes (such as Carefor the Family’s 21st Century Parent) connect parents to their schools and communities by promoting voluntary participation and community service, guide parents in buildingpersonal success assets in their children, build skills in parents themselves and change attitudes.

The universal nature of the programmes offered means that all parents are invited (home visits help to explain that these are not just for the problem families), the actual programmes are facilitated by the school social worker but parent-led, and they aim tobuild solid partnerships between parents and teachers and between parents and parents.The effect on communities of the social capital generated is hard to measure but easy todiscern, as disadvantaged families are getting support in the most fundamental ways –they describe a sense of belonging, less social isolation (50% of all calls to Parentline Plusare made by parents who feel isolated), and feelings of greater self-worth and significance.Crucially, he says, they are not being taken down a single-track road of targeted improvement.

Simon Langley is realistic; he knows he will still have to refer some families to other services. Courses that get the full spectrum of parents together will not solve everything,but they do decrease troubled families’ sense of stigma and failure and make them muchmore receptive to targeted help if needed. A genuinely preventive approach – early intervention in the truest sense – recognises that it is within a child’s family that much of the “carving of the marble” takes place. Education has a huge role to play here, not least in maintaining gains achieved by pre-school intervention, and in narrowing attainment gaps.

But we have to bear in mind that the most underachieving group is white children fromdisadvantaged backgrounds – fewer than 20% of disadvantaged white boys attain five A*-C grades at GCSE. Certain ethnic minorities, including Indian and Chinese children, perform notably better than the rest of the population. As one study referred to in thisvolume states, white British children are:

… particularly vulnerable to low socio-economic class, mothers with no educational qualifications, relative poverty, living in single parent households, rented housing or

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deprived neighbourhoods. These factors impact negatively on attainment within all ethnic groups, but seem to be associated with disproportionately low attainment amongwhite British.2

In Breakdown Britain we quoted the (then) Department for Education & Skills, which said:

Differences in social mobility between ethnic groups (especially Chinese and Indian) showthat some minority ethnic groups are more likely to be upwardly mobile than their white counterparts – in part due to parental aspirations, support and the value placed on education.3

Hence my feeling of having come full circle: the Social Justice Policy Group emphasisedthe need to treat educational failure as just one pathway to poverty and the importanceof intervening early. Helping families at the earliest stages of children’s lives has to becomplemented by engaging them meaningfully in the early years of children’s education– in a way that will root them, in the longer term, into the learning community that everyschool can and should aspire to be.

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2 Strand S, Minority Ethnic Pupils in the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (Department for Children,Schools & Families, 2008)3 Department for Education & Skills Social Mobility: Narrowing Social Class Educational Attainment Gaps (2006)


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Introduction 2Graham Allen MP, Chair of One Nottingham and Labour MP forNottingham North

So I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle – that if I couldbe anything in life I would be a good father to my girls, that if I could give them anythingI would give them that rock – that foundation – on which to build their lives, and thatwould be the greatest gift I could offer.Barack Obama

The day in September 2008 that Iain Duncan Smith and I launched our publication Early Intervention was the day that Lehman Brothers went belly up. The global economic crisis will have a profound impact on early intervention, just as it will in every other field. However, rather than be an excuse to postpone activity, it should be seen as an opportunity to grasp new possibilities for both the higher levels of effectiveness and the lower levels of public expenditure, which early intervention can deliver. In a periodwhen money is ever tighter, the profligate funding of late intervention is neither goodvalue for money nor an effective public policy.

The early measures taken by governments across the world to combat the recession andthe global financial crisis illustrate that serious policy reappraisal as well as massiveamounts of public money can be found at quite short notice – in just one day in October,the UK government guaranteed a minimum of £250 billion in support to the finance sector.Such sums dwarf the relatively small amounts of money needed to make early interventionwork. They have the added advantage of being a massive investment in the future.

Government and society can take a stake that pays for itself time and again in reducedteen pregnancies, higher educational attainment, less antisocial behaviour and criminality,and better literacy levels. Later contributors underline how tiny amounts of money can,for example, bring literacy to an adequate level and save large multiples of money, whichare required over a lifetime if reading difficulties are neglected. The banking collapse wasquick and dramatic; the social consequences of not intervening early, while often barelyperceptible, are just as certain and even more expensive. Young people who cannot readbooks can cost as much as banks who cannot balance them.

The economic crisis has also made it apparent that the announcement of the end of politics and of political philosophy has been premature. There is no value-free, non-political middle ground which has superseded the need for old-fashioned concepts suchas equality of opportunity. When a neo-con President nationalises US banks, clearly a


whole raft of ideological certainties, especially about social intervention, have to beditched. Society can no more be a free-for-all than can the market.

Early intervention may lack the drama of the banking bail out, but it is equally necessaryand equally revolutionary. Addressing a series of individual symptoms is no longer an adequate response to thousands of our young people leaving school illiterate, pregnant,unqualified, unaspirational and underachieving. It requires a coherent early interventionstrategy applied across parties and across generations.

Early intervention covers a raft of policies around the 0-18 age range designed to breakthe intergenerational cycle of deprivation and underachievement. Many of the themesoutlined in the previous publication in this series, Early Intervention, are central to the primary school phase. The foundation of this approach is to promote social and emotionalcapability in our young people. Only with this firm foundation can they go further withtheir language skills and academic attainment, including literacy and numeracy.

Those basic social and emotional capabilities may be common in many parts of the country; however, in constituencies like my own, sub-optimal parenting means those skillsare lacking and need to be made good by public policy. For example, One Nottingham (ourlocal strategic partnership) has developed a package of interventions that do this both involume terms (for every child in our city) and against four key targets (where specificassistance is needed for individuals or groups). Once we have given the social and emotional competences to everyone in our educational system, and built the basic academic capabilities on top of that, we will require a much smaller safety net for remedial activities – which, while massively expensive, are only ever partially effective.

Another concept relevant to primary level, which was floated in our first EarlyIntervention publication, was that children should only start school when they are ready,rather than when they reach some arbitrary age. Children in the UK arrive at school at theage of five from a massive spectrum of capabilities. It is cruel to the point of inhumanityto force the five-year-old who is not ready into school so that they are doomed to a lifetime of failure. It is so much more effective to have that young person take anotheryear to be properly tutored and be able to gain educationally on every single day of thesubsequent 11 years at school. Variants of this system are used in many parts of the world.It needs to be instituted in the UK so that we can turn out successful learners, rather thanadminister a tidy educational bureaucracy.

Early intervention often has to be funded by institutions that themselves reap no immediate benefit, and this is made evident in later chapters. For example, primary

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schools may be expected to bear the costs of specialist Reading Recovery teaching, yet getnone of the recognition or benefits from that, since these benefits occur later in the system. By devising effective partnerships, tangible benefits can be shared so that all those who actually make the early investment can reap rewards from it later.

We must also remove the unintended and perverse disincentives that come with Westerndemocracy’s most over-centralised state. For example, primary schools can be better offhaving lower standards from which they can recover, rather than starting with higherstandards. Similarly, those children furthest from an arbitrary level get less attention thanthose close to it who carry “brownie-point” potential.

Good parenting is the start and end of all these developments, which is why the extendedtitle of our last publication was Early Intervention: Good Parents, Great Kids, BetterCitizens. Our ambition is to create the good parents of the next generation from theyoung people now going through our nursery and school system. We are hoping to create a virtuous circle, so that those children grow up to pass on the good values andeffective parenting that will in turn make their children capable citizens.

However, installing smoke alarms does not mean we can stop fighting fires, and there area large number of young people who meanwhile undertake remedial programmes.Reading Recovery is an example of such a programme. Nottingham now has a teacher-leader who is busy training 24 Reading Recovery teachers in Nottingham schools. Over theyear, 140 to 190 of the most deprived children in the city will be rescued from literacy failure, with many more to come in future years as the number of trained teachers grows.

The Reading Recovery programme, comprising 12-20 weeks of one-to-one teaching forsix-year-olds, leads to eight out of 10 returning to average levels of reading which are sustained thereafter. The key is professional teaching on a one-to-one basis — this makes the sort of help that middle-class parents pay for whenever their children are not achieving into the norm for all our children.

Finally, teaching of social and emotional aspects of learning (SEAL) is being introducedthroughout all primary schools in the UK. It has to be continued at secondary school. Therecent government proposal that life skills teaching for 11- to 16-year-olds will be mademuch more coherent and a central part of the national curriculum must be enacted. Thisis a priority for One Nottingham over the coming year and, well ahead of any legislation,we are already talking to head teachers and government ministers about how to free upsufficient curriculum time and reduce the inhibiting day-to-day pressures placed onheads, so that this curriculum can be implemented in September 2009.


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Giving every child the foundation of social and emotional capability throughout theirschool life – which, sadly, many do not bring to school at present because of poor parenting levels – is the key to tackling so many of the symptoms of underachievement.There can be no question that, if children are properly equipped emotionally and socially,they will be able to master the basic skills to which each of our distinguished contributorsrefer. In that way, all children will have the personal competences to make the best of their potential.

These social and emotional skills are the greatest gifts that parents and schools can giveto our young people to create the good parents, great kids, better citizens of tomorrow. It is a small but essential investment, which in this age of financial profligacy we cannotafford to miss.


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1 Chowdry, H et al Widening Participation in Higher Education: Analysis using Linked Administrative Data(Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2008)

Introduction 3David Laws MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools andFamilies and Liberal Democrat MP for Yeovil

Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that thedaughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can becomethe head of the mine … It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are giventhat separates one person from another.Nelson Mandela

The reality of opportunity for every child must be one of our greatest aspirations. However,an increasing body of evidence from academics and think tanks has shown us that it is far from being one of the hallmarks of our own society. The intergenerational cycle of poverty condemns thousands of children to a life without the chance to succeed, whichthe majority take for granted.

This important collection of essays surveys this problem, and offers solutions in the areawhere they can have the most profound effect. By the time children are in their teens, itis usually too late. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that the higher-educationparticipation gap between the most deprived and least deprived is just 1% for boys and 2.1% for girls with similar attainment levels. Their report showed that educationaldisadvantage had already set in by age 11, before secondary school.1

This point is picked up by Jean Gross in the opening chapter. Picking up from the previousbooklet in this series, which demonstrated the necessity of pre-school intervention tobreak cycles of disadvantage, she lays out the grounds for greater intervention at earlyschool age. Primary school, she argues, represents the last chance to make a real difference.

The statistics revealed in Charlotte Leslie and Chris Skidmore’s analysis in the final chapter corroborate her assessment. By going beyond the traditional measure of outcomes at GCSE, to look more closely at early education, they show where the real problems lie. Some of this is truly shocking: that 16% of pupils make no progress at all inmaths between the ages of seven and 11, and 40% leave primary school without gainingthe expected level in the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. Unsurprisingly, itis the poorest areas that are the worst hit. Sixty percent of the poorest children – those entitled to free school meals – have not reached the standards expected by the end of primary school.


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The reasons for this are complex, but not unfathomable. Gross rightly points out thatleague tables and national attainment targets have had the side effect of encouragingschools to concentrate on pupils near key stage level boundaries, to the detriment ofthose below (and possibly of those above). She also criticises the government’s targetingof funding, and calls for earmarked funding for interventions with a stronger account-ability framework.

A pupil premium, as proposed by the Liberal Democrats, works along these lines, linkingfunding to the needs of individual pupils, such as deprivation or the speech, language andcommunication needs described in chapter two. It would allow schools to choose how to spend the additional funds to meet the needs of all their pupils. Accountability for spending would come from a combination of governors, Ofsted, parents and the local authority.

Schools could use the extra funding from the pupil premium for schemes such as those explored in chapter three. Every year around 23,000 children are leaving primaryschool with very low skills in both literacy and numeracy. Various forms of intervention can address this, such as intensive one-on-one tuition, or extra classes at evenings or weekends.

Even without the pupil premium, funding needs a comprehensive review to ensure thatevery school receives a fair share. There is clear evidence that small class sizes in the earliest years of school can make a huge difference to children’s education. Money shouldbe directed to reduce class sizes for five- to seven-year-olds towards private school levels. Smaller classes would help ensure that no child is allowed to fall behind in the basic skills.

It is also important to remember, as Professor Katherine Weare suggests in her chapter,that early education is not just about literacy and numeracy, but also about developingchildren’s social and emotional skills. Good-quality early education can lead to improvedbehaviour and influence children’s attitudes towards school and learning, cutting downon the number of problems teachers must tackle in the later years. The government’srecent announcement of personal, social, health and economic education for youngerchildren was a welcome advance. Properly trained teachers would allow children to develop into more aware teenagers and adults, who are better able to work together and make good decisions for themselves.

There are, though, limits on what schooling alone can achieve. Professor Frances Gardneris right when she says in her chapter that the cycle of disadvantage cannot be broken


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without helping parents to bring up their children. Families in 21st-century Britain comein a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and all need proper support. The effects of poor parenting are profound, both on school behaviour and later in life.

As Dr Lee Elliot-Major and the Sutton Trust have shown, the level of family support for young children directly affects their later educational achievement. Children from low-income families who perform well in cognitive tests at age two have already beenovertaken by their peers from better-off families by age six to seven. This statistic, perhapsmore than any other, underlines the need for early intervention. We need to ensure thatgood-quality support is in place, and that entitlements such as the 12.5 hours a week ofpre-school education are actually taken up by parents on lower incomes. Such supportshould not be framed in an overly prescriptive curriculum, but provided by professionalswho know how to give every child the best start in life.

The challenge is great. The solutions are neither simple, nor are they short-term. Theessays that follow detail not just the problem, or the urgency of the need for action, butalso serious policy suggestions. Breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty will take a concentrated and co-ordinated effort, but it is not out of reach. The essays in this collection make an important contribution to charting the course for action.


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Chapter 1

Why we need to target four- toeight-year-olds

Jean Gross, Director of the Every Child a Chance Trust


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1 Feinstein, l and Bynner, J “Mobility in Pupils’ Cognitive Attainment During School Life” in Oxford Review of EconomicPolicy no 20 (2004)2 Farringdon, D “Childhood Risk Factors and Risk-focused Prevention” in Oxford Handbook of Criminology (OxfordUniversity Press, 2007)

Why we need to target four- to eight-year-olds

Are you going to treat a man as he is or as he might be? Morality requires that you should treat him as might be, as he has it in him to become; business on the other handrequires that you treat him as he is. Raising what he is to what he might be is the work of education.William Temple

This booklet is about creating a society in which where you have come from need not dictate where you are going. It is about what we can do to make a difference in children’sprimary school years – typically the Cinderella of an education system where too muchmoney goes on troubled teenage children and relatively little on the critical years betweenfive and 11, when children learn how to behave and learn how to learn.

Why focus on the primary school years?The first booklet in this series, Early Intervention: Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens,focused on an early intervention strategy aimed at breaking the intergenerational cycle ofdisadvantage through interventions in early childhood – infancy and the pre-school years.It also indicated that such a strategy would not of itself be enough to break the cycle and suggested a need for follow-on work with older children.

What is the evidence for such a need? Why is it not enough to get small children “school-ready” and then leave it to the normal educative process to make sure that disadvantagedchildren keep up with their peers?

First, early school-age intervention provides a second chance to level the playing field.Interventions in the primary school years can make up for a poor pre-school start.Feinstein and Bynner,1 for example, in their survey of a cohort of children born in 1970,found that children who were poor performers at the age of five, but managed to becomehigh performers by the age of 10, were as successful in adulthood (looking at factors suchas educational success, wage levels and criminality) as if they had never been under-performing at age five. And for some intergenerational issues – such as the risk of gettinginvolved in crime – middle childhood is actually the age at which intervention strategiesare thought to be most effective.2


Second, early school-age interventions serve to maintain any gains achieved by pre-school intervention. A number of recent studies3 have provided evidence of the needfor continuous interventions throughout early schooling among the most disadvantagedand at-risk children, if early academic and social gains are not to fade and children are to grow up as proactive and confident citizens.

However excellent the support provided for their language and social development in theearly years, children face new cognitive challenges when they are taught to read, writeand handle numbers. If they succeed, they will see themselves as learners and school asrelevant to their goals. If they fail, and live in areas of high social deprivation, they receiveconfirmation that, as with most of their acquaintance, education is to be endured ratherthan enjoyed.

Third, we know that just leaving things to the normal schooling process is not enough.What schools do now is actually widening the social class attainment gap, rather thannarrowing it. Years of government spending weighted significantly towards schools serving socially disadvantaged areas have often done no more than help more advantaged children in those schools do better than they did before. The attainment gap betweenschools serving poorer and richer communities has narrowed significantly; the attainmentgap between individuals eligible or not eligible for free school meals has narrowed less –and widens progressively over the school years. Figure 1 shows how at each key stage students on free school meals fall behind others within their peer group.

The widening gap is a particular feature of white British children – more so than for children from ethnic-minority groups. The educational attainment of this group is …

… particularly vulnerable to low socio-economic class, mothers with no educational qualifications, relative poverty, living in single parent households, rented housing ordeprived neighbourhoods. These factors impact negatively on attainment within all ethnic groups, but seem to be associated with disproportionately low attainment amongwhite British.4

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3 Alakeson, V Too Much, Too Late: Life Chances & Spending on Education & Training (Social Market Foundation, 2005);Wood, C and Caulier-Grice, J Fade or Flourish (Social Market Foundation, 2006); Utting, D et al Interventions forChildren at Risk of Developing Antisocial Personality Disorder (Policy Research Bureau, 2007)4 Strand, S Minority Ethnic Pupils in the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (Department for Children,Schools & Families, 2008)


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Figure 1: Relative achievement of children on free school meals Cohort mean average point scores at key stages one to three show poorer pupils falling further behind at each stage

Source: Narrowing social class attainment gaps (DfES, 2006)

A final reason for providing help in the early school years is that this period represents the last critical window of opportunity in which change is possible. Research on how totackle the early signs of antisocial behaviour through parenting programmes, described inchapter five of this monograph, shows that intervention when children are between fourand eight years old will have the greatest effect.

Evidence on effective ways of addressing the literacy and numeracy problems often associated with social deprivation, reviewed in chapter three, shows that remedial actionat age 11 is too late. Remedial action even at eight, nine or 10 is too late – given that achild failing to achieve the nationally expected standard at age seven in reading, writingand maths has an almost zero chance of later getting five good GCSEs including Englishand maths, compared with a 46% chance for a seven-year-old achieving the standard inall three areas and 10% for one achieving it in just one area.

Targeting school-aged childrenSchools are in an ideal position to help children overcome accidents of birth, yet are themost difficult sector to reach in any strategy for breaking the cycle of disadvantage andincreasing social mobility. They tend to prioritise spending on children who with just a little help can reach nationally expected attainment levels, in order to raise overall standards quickly in their school – the key Ofsted and league table indicator. As chapterseven in this monograph documents, this leaves behind a resistant “tail” of hard-to-teachchildren and hard-to-reach families.

Level 18 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5 Level 6

Non-FSM

FSM

Key stage 1 Key stage 2 Key stage 3


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This government has already targeted large amounts of funding to tackle disadvantage in school-aged children – for example, through programmes such as Excellence in Cities, On Track and the Children’s Fund. There is little substantive evidence that this has had asignificant effect on the hardest-to-reach children.

Local areas have, on the whole, not invested in evidence-based intervention programmes.The Children’s Fund gave rise to a large number of local projects, designed in the light of local enthusiasms but insufficiently focused on the few things that will really make adifference. While Excellence in Cities provided local areas with guidance on evidence-based early preventive interventions, most schools chose reactive and less well-evidencedoptions such as employing teaching assistants or attaching learning mentors to older children struggling with behaviour or attendance.

A case in point – what happened to On Track On Track was a Home Office initiative operating in 23 high-deprivation areas of Englandand Wales. It was inspired by the successful US Fast Track programme aimed at childrenaged four to 12 and their families. Like Fast Track, it aimed to reduce the incidence ofyouth crime and antisocial behaviour.

Each area received in the order of £400,000 per year between 1999 and 2006. Governmentprovided broad guidance on the types of intervention that might be developed, andexhorted local areas to use schemes that had an evidence base behind them. In practice,few took this advice.

Most of the services provided were invented locally, ranging from drop-ins for parents totraining children in massage. A comprehensive evaluation5 noted that “there was not onestandardised On Track model or service … rather there were 23 different interpretations of the original brief … and hundreds of kinds of different services contained within the projects”.

Results were very mixed. There were improvements at the level of perceptions (for example,parents’ self-assessed levels of coping) but remarkably little impact on child behaviourssuch as antisocial behaviour, offending, truancy and poor performance at school – in contrast with the more prescriptive but still locally managed Fast Track scheme, where evidence of impact on academic attainment and behaviour problems was very strong.

5 Ghate, D, Asmussen, K, Tian, Y and Hauari, H On Track Phase Two National Evaluation (Department for Children,Schools & Families, 2008)


Just providing funding to tackle social disadvantage has not so far proved successful intackling the hardest-to-reach children and families. This leaves two options:

• strengthening the accountability framework by setting targets for schools, for exampleto reduce the attainment gap between children eligible for free school meals andthose who are not eligible, to increase the social or “soft” skills of poorer children andto reduce numbers exhibiting antisocial behaviour; or

• earmarking funding not only for schools serving poorer areas but for a specific menuof interventions that work.

The first option would mean developing systems that are not now in place, to measurechildren’s social and emotional competences. Tools are available but would add to teacher-s’ workload and risk increasing the bureaucratic burden. There is also little politicalappetite for adding new targets to the public services’ accountability framework.

The second option would require policy makers to provide stronger guidance to schoolsthan they might wish to, and stronger encouragement to use approved and rated programmes, be they provided by the third sector or by innovative players from the public or private sectors. Serious thought needs to be given to how well a policy of giving schools freedom to spend on initiatives of their own choice has worked in the pastor will work in the future for the most disadvantaged children. A parallel could be drawnwith the National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines provided inthe health service. We do not leave it up to doctors to decide what medication and interventions they prescribe, but have a robust system for guiding their choices.

One possibility then is to deploy the “pupil premium” for poorer children that has beendiscussed by some politicians, for earmarked programmes based on research evidence onwhat works in helping vulnerable children and young people break the cycle of povertyand disadvantage, and avoid social exclusion.

The big hittersMost of the educational effort aimed at narrowing gaps in the past 10 years has gone onschool improvement – seeking to improve the quality of teaching, the physical environ-ment, and school ethos in schools serving disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Laudable inintent, it is a strategy that is yielding decreasing returns. It has led to all sorts of top-downprescriptive directives about how teachers should teach and how head teachers shouldrun schools. And as we have seen, it never got to those most in need.

Now is the time to think about a much simpler strategy – moving from the indirect

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6 Kendall, S, Straw, S, Jones, M, Springate, I and Grayson, H Narrowing the Gap: Outcomes for Vulnerable Groups(National Foundation for Educational Research, 2008)7 Bynner, J Risks & Outcomes of Social Exclusion: Insights from Longitudinal Data (Institute of Education, 2003)

approaches that rely on improving the quality of classroom teaching to direct approachesusing high-reliability strategies for at-risk groups. We need to find the big hitters – thefive or six things that offer certainty in breaking the link between who a child’s parentsare and what life chances that child has – and invest as heavily in them as the first mono-graph in this series of pamphlets suggested we do in support for those aged up to five.

Figure 2: The three key protective factors that increase the likelihood of positive life outcomes

Research shows that high attainment at school, good social competences and positiveparenting are the three key protective factors that increase the likelihood of positive lifeoutcomes by boosting children’s resilience. It is here that we will find our big hitters – inapproaches that simultaneously target home, school and community – working at thelevel of the child’s family relationships, social relationships and academic success.

“Simultaneously” is a key word here. Lifting children out of negative life chances meansmaking sure we attend to “the range of obstacles that hold children back, rather than single issue interventions”.6 Risk for these children is cumulative. One risk factor reinforcesanother, leading to increasingly restricted outcomes in adult life.7 Poor parenting, whichleaves children parked for hours in front of the television, leads to limited communicationskills, which in turn lead to behavioural problems, which provoke harsh and hostile parenting. Limited language skills in turn lead to literacy problems, which lead to behavioural problems. And so it goes on.

Parenting support

Language, literacy and numeracy

Social and emotional competences


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Happily, just as risk is cumulative, so are the factors that help lift children out of the cycle.For example, parental involvement in a child’s learning is strongly positively influenced bythe child’s level of attainment. The higher the level of attainment, the more parents get involved, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.8

Family relationshipsParental interest in a child’s education is the single most powerful predictor of achievementat age 16. There is a 24% difference in achievement between those with low and thosewith high parental interest.9 And we know that in the primary age range the influence ofdifferent levels of parental involvement (across all social classes and all ethnic groups) ismuch bigger than differences associated with variations in the quality of schools.10

Change in children is possible. Change in parents is possible too. Research has shown thatin parenting “it’s not who you are, it’s what you do that counts”. Even where families livein poverty, children can achieve well where parents are helped to be responsive to theirchildren and committed to their education.

In chapter four, Professor Frances Gardner reviews what we know about how to make this happen in relation to children’s behaviour. There is equally much research-basedknowledge on how to make it happen in relation to their learning. The evidence suggeststhat effective parenting programmes need to include:

• basic “skills” input on how to promote children’s learning, how to set clear andconsistent boundaries for children, how to reward appropriate behaviour with praise,how to use “time out” when children behave inappropriately;

• adjunct training in problem solving, communication and self-control which is designedto help parents cope more successfully with negative life stresses and marital conflict,and without which there may not be great benefits from the skills programmes;

• work that fosters supportive networks for the parents, by basing group parent trainingwork in the community, with parents each having a buddy within the group formutual support, for example; and

• promoting parents’ involvement with schools and with the community – for example,“homework” assignments that give parents examples of questions they might askteachers and ways in which they might share their knowledge of their childwith teachers.

8 Desforges, C and Abouchaar, A The Impact of Parental Involvement, Parental Support & Family Education on PupilAchievements & Adjustment (Department for Education & Skills, 2003)9 Feinstein, L and Symons, J Attainment in Secondary School, Oxford economic papers no 51 (Oxford University Press, 1998)10 Desforges and Abouchaar, op cit


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11 Blanden, J et al Accounting for Intergenerational Income Persistence: Non-cognitive Skills, Ability & Education(Centre for the Economics of Education, 2006)

Social relationshipsWork on parenting skills and family relationships needs to run in parallel with work that willhelp the child with social skills – getting on with others, communication, social problem solving, negotiation, conflict resolution, managing anger and anxiety. Good social andemotional skills like these are becoming increasingly important in the modern world: essentialto learning, valued by employers, and necessary in sticking to goals and staying out of trouble.

Such skills are closely linked to social mobility. It has been shown that whereas cognitivevariables account for 20% of intergenerational persistence of disadvantage, social andemotional skills account for a further 10%.11 As labour markets have changed, good socialand emotional skills have increased their importance as a determinant of life chances by a factor of 33.

In chapter four, Professor Katherine Weare reminds us why these soft skills are so vital fordisadvantaged children and how they can be promoted in the primary school years.

Success in schoolSpoken language is the foundation of success in school. As chapter two makes clear, allacademic school subjects require children to have a rich vocabulary and an ability tomanipulate ideas through complex language structures. Yet in a poor household a childwill hear 500 different words a day while in a rich household they will hear 1,500. Headteachers speak of increasing numbers of children who hear little language at homebeyond the “daily grunt”. As a result, it is estimated that one in 10 children start schoolunable to talk in sentences or understand simple instructions. Poor language skills in turnimpair the acquisition of literacy and numeracy.

Recent studies suggest that significant literacy and/or numeracy difficulties are found inbetween 50% and 76% of children who are permanently excluded from school, and in60% of the population of special schools for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, as well as occurring in 50-60% of the prison population. Some 45% of looked-after children in one local authority could not read or write at age seven.

The most successful strategy for combating antisocial behaviour linked to social disadvantage is, therefore, likely to be preventing the early language, literacy and numeracy failure that is strongly linked to social disadvantage. Better basic skills will inturn contribute to an improved chance of gaining qualifications. Chapters two and threedescribe the strategies that work in this area.


ConclusionThe chapters that follow focus in turn on the three key areas that can effect change indisadvantaged children – language, literacy and numeracy skills, social relationships andfamily relationships. There is also a chapter on another fundamental element in the mix –raising aspirations, so that once early intervention programmes have given children theskills they need, they and their families have a sense of just how far those skills can takethem. Finally, we look ahead to the secondary school years and examine the evidence that shows how, without early intervention, a significant number of young people will fall out of the system, achieving not even the most basic qualifications after all their years in school.

Each author examines in turn the rationale for expenditure on their focus area in breakingthe cycle of disadvantage, what schemes work, and what the barriers are to their use.Make no mistake: the barriers are considerable. Every chapter shows the long-term savings that will result from an early intervention strategy focusing on primary schoolyears, but realising these will require the same kind of long-term vision from politiciansadvocated in the first monograph in this series. This is well nigh impossible to achieve ina political climate where, in the words of a leading chief constable speaking recently aboutsocial breakdown, “there is no appetite for solutions that have no visible return and nopatience for any which will not bear immediate political fruit”.

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Chapter 2

How speech, language and communication are linked tosocial disadvantage

John Bercow MP, Conservative MP for Buckingham, Virginia Beardshaw, Chief Executive of I CAN, and Anita Kerwin-Nye, Director of Communications at I CAN


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How speech, language and communication are linked to social disadvantage

For far too long communication has been elbowed aside by policy makers focused onother parts of the child development agenda. John Bercow1

Communication is at the core of all social interaction. The ability to communicate, tospeak and express ourselves, to understand what we are being asked to do, to enjoy a richness of language that enables us to describe our hopes and fears – these are the foundation skills for life. Most parents await their child’s first words anxiously and theyassume that speech and language will “just happen” as part of a child’s growth and development. Yet, for some children, it does not.

In some parts of the UK, upwards of 50% of children are starting at their primary schoolwithout the speech, language and communication skills that they need in order to learn,achieve, make friends and interact with the world around them.2 This is a problem forthem, and it is an unexpected challenge for the school, which all too often is ill equippedto meet it.

There is clear evidence that poor speech, language and communication skills are both acause and an effect of social disadvantage.3 This chapter explores the reasons for this linkand considers the interventions and approaches necessary to support these children intoprimary schools – crucial given that early identification and intervention can help ensurethat these potentially transient and addressable difficulties do not become persistent, lifelong challenges.

What are the factors influencing speech, language and communication skills?There are a significant number of children for whom particular speech, language andcommunication needs arise from impairments and disability. There is no evidence thatsuch needs are linked to social disadvantage, although the challenges to support a childwith complex and persistent needs can certainly be compounded by it.

The identification of and provision for these children – as many as three in every

1 Bercow, J A Review of Services for Children & Young People with Speech, Language & Communication Needs, the Bercow report (Department for Children, Schools & Families, 2008)2 Locke, A, Ginsborg, J and Peers, I “Development and Disadvantage: Implications for Early Years” in InternationalJournal of Communication & Language Disorders vol 27, no 1 (2002)3 Cross, M Language & Social Exclusion, I CAN Talk series issue 4 (I CAN, 2007)


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4 Bercow, op cit5 www.stokespeaksout.co.uk

classroom with mild and moderate needs and a significant number needing specialistinterventions – have been considered in a recent independent review4 and, while many ofthe interventions outlined in this chapter would support this group of children, childrenwhose speech, language and communication needs are linked to impairment or disabilityare not the focus of this essay.

Instead we explore the series of multiple and overlapping factors that appear to explainthe apparent correlation between social disadvantage and inadequate language skills andconsider the approaches that may support what in some parts of the country can be asmany as 84%5 of children who struggle with speech and language, potentially as a directresult of social and environmental factors.

The key factors affecting children’s speech, language and communication skills are:

• language input;• quality of early interactions;• active cultivation by parents; and• multigenerational transmission.

Language inputThe amount of language that children hear is important; the more they hear, the moretime their parents spend talking with them and the more words to which they areexposed, the more words they will use. What adults say to children is also important –children seem to develop strong language skills where their parents ask open-ended questions,invite children to elaborate, and focus on topics of interest to the child. Where children donot benefit from frequent input of high quality, they are at a notable disadvantage.

Quality of early interactions Just hearing language is not enough to help children be effective communicators. Whatis much more relevant is the quality of interaction a child experiences. Babies and childrenneed their emotions and attempts to communicate to be responded to in a positive wayin order to help them to learn. These kinds of responsive early interactions, which under-pin healthy attachment, are important for the development of thinking, language andemotional literacy skills. Sadly, the reverse is also true, and children who do not havestrong early attachments are at significant risk of disadvantage as regards language,thinking and behaviour.


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In essence, the early interactions that a child experiences affect the rest of his or herdevelopment. As a child grows, co-operative interactions, as well as conversations abouthow people feel and how that affects what they do, are important in learning social communication skills. Where this is not possible, either because of a lack of time and energy or because of a directive manner and authoritarian parenting style, there may beeffects on a child’s language development.

Active cultivation by parentsParents’ involvement has a major effect on children’s learning, especially in the early years,and on their success at school. Middle-class families tend actively to “cultivate” their children and to teach them language, reasoning and negotiation skills, which other children may lack. A seminal study looking at the language environments of differenthomes found that while the average child hears 1,500 words per hour, professional children are exposed to 2,100 words per hour but children with parents on benefits hear only 600 words per hour.6

However, some would argue that active cultivation can have negative effects, because itcan lead to too great a focus on “teaching” and not enough on interacting and playing.What parents do, rather than who they are, makes a difference.7 Activities such as reading with a child and creating regular opportunities to play with friends lead to betteroutcomes for children, intellectually, socially and behaviourally.

Studies suggest that parents who have not themselves experienced a responsive, language-rich environment, who did not achieve at school and who perhaps have poor literacy arenot in a good position to provide positive communication opportunities for their children.This may be because such parents do not necessarily know about communication development or how best to encourage it.

The cost of poor communication – to individuals and to societyWe know that speech, language and communication skills have an impact on literacy andwider attainment. A child who cannot speak a sentence will be doubly challenged whenreading or writing a sentence. Recent analysis of results at age five shows that the bestpredictor of attainment at age seven is communication, language and literacy skills.Conversely, children with speech, language and communication needs struggle to accessthe curriculum and attain.

6 Hart, B and Risley, TR Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Brookes, 1995)7 Sylva, K et al The EPPE Project: Findings from the Pre-school Period, Department for Education & Skills research briefRBX15-03 (Department for Education & Skills, 2003)


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Looking more widely than academic attainment, each of the Every Child Matters outcomes relies upon effective speech, language and communication skills. Economic success, community contribution, and health and well-being all have proven links to the ability to understand and express feelings, needs and opinions. Indeed, in America therising number of children with speech, language and communication needs is considereda public health challenge.

As well as the effects on literacy and attainment, emotional and social development canbe affected by language difficulties. Poor communication is also a risk factor for mentalhealth problems. Not surprisingly, low self-esteem, bullying and behavioural problems areall linked with communication difficulties; a recent study showed that 60-90% of juvenileoffenders have poor language skills.8 Finding a job in a world where communication andsocial communication skills, as well as academic achievement, are prized can also be achallenge for someone without these attainments.

I CAN’s Cost to the Nation of Children’s Poor Communication considers the emerging evidence of the growing importance of addressing impoverished language. Without adequate communication skills, children run an increased risk of ending up NEET (not in education, employment and training at aged 16-18). Each child who becomes NEET costs£97,000. Using these figures, we can estimate that the poor speech and language skills ofthe 2006 national cohort of five-year-olds could cost nearly £4 billion over their lifetimeif left unaddressed. The current primary school cohort could cost £26 billion.

The cost of “James”A study by the Audit Commission in 20049 developed a case study of a fictional 16-year-old, “James”, to illustrate the financial cost of not intervening to support speech, languageand other educational and social needs at an early age.

Actual interventions and estimated costs gave a figure of £153,687. This included two custodial terms in secure units before the age of 16. The cost of providing speech and language support and an educational psychologist from the age of five to 15 was £42,243.

Assuming that the “crime route” was avoided, a saving of £111,444 in criminal justice costsis made through early diagnosis of learning difficulties and intervention to address them.

8 Bryan, K, Freer, J and Furlong, C “Language and Communication Difficulties in Juvenile Offenders” in InternationalJournal of Communication & Language Disorders vol 42 (2007)9 Youth Justice 2004: A Review of the Reformed Youth Justice System (Audit Commission, 2004)


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How can we build effective speech, language and communication skills in the primary school?Given that language is a developmental process, with skills building on previous learningand neurological development, the argument for early intervention is clear. Addressingspeech, language and communication needs before the age of five can help to preventneeds becoming intractable. While support post-primary age will always be helpful, andthe dearth of speech, language and communication services at secondary level is anational disgrace, evidence points to the benefits of early intervention and the dangers of its absence.

A strategy to improve speech, language and communication, particularly among the mostdisadvantaged families, requires a four-pronged approach:

• improving language models and skills of parents to support early communication;• developing curriculums for early years and at primary school with an increased focus

on the full range of speech, language and communication skills;• skilling the workforce to deliver both an improved universal offer and to support those

who need additional help; and• adopting evidence-based models to create language-rich environments and to deliver

appropriate targeted services.

Work with parentsWork within Sure Start, the voluntary programme Home Start and cross-agency local initiatives such as Stoke Speaks Out10 has done much to start developing the skills of parents to support their children’s speech, language and communication development.

Initiatives within school-age programmes are more limited, reflecting the wider challenges that schools face in facilitating parent engagement. Early work with I CAN’sCommunication Cookbook11 at both foundation stage and key stage one has demonstratedthe value of developing resources around speech and language that can be used by parents to help prepare children for school and are used by both teachers in the classroomand families at home to reinforce learning. The cookbook demystifies communicationdevelopment for parents and for the children’s workforce, boiling it down to five essential ingredients that everyone can understand: attention and listening, vocabulary,building sentences, telling stories and conversations.

10 www.stokespeaksout.co.uk 11 www.ican.org.uk


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Similar success has been seen with the Basic Skills Agency’s Talk to Me project.

Developing appropriate curriculumsA continued and increased focus on speech, language and communication within curriculums remains a priority. While this focus is present in both the early years foundation stage and the Primary National Strategy, there is no cause for complacencyand there are two grounds for concern.

First, it is not clear that current standards and targets are based on best available evidence.Secondly, although designed to be cross-curricular, speaking and listening programmesare not strongly entrenched or mainstreamed across the curriculum but instead are oftennarrowly compartmentalised within the teaching of literacy. In an assessment-driven culture, the relative under-importance placed on speech and language is a big problem,and decisive action is needed to ratchet the subject up the list of priorities.

Developing the workforceThe development of the workforce is essential. Too many teachers, particularly thoseentering the profession at postgraduate level, have limited child development knowledge,and surveys demonstrate a continuing lack of confidence in supporting and includingchildren who find speech and language hard.

The Department for Children, Schools & Families’ Inclusion Development Programme provides a welcome starting point for raising awareness of speech, language and communication needs. While it is a programme focused on special educational needs anddisability, much of its content could be applied to support those with poor language skillsresulting from environmental factors. In addition, the Communication Trust’s Speech,Language and Communication Framework provides clarity on the skills required by theentire workforce, and attention might usefully be applied to exploring further how theseskills can be embedded within whole-school professional development programmes.

Models of interventionThe recent Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists’ position paper on supportingchildren’s communication needs in integrated services emphasises the need for models of intervention that look at enhancing a child’s communication environment as well as directly remediating more persistent difficulties. A communication-supportive environment at pre-school level and the primary school will enhance a child’s language atthis crucial developmental stage and minimise the effects of transient communicationdifficulties.


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Alongside this, there are resources such as the Tower Hamlets Targets and ActivitiesProject, which provide further ideas for activities to encourage language development atdifferent levels. I CAN’s innovative web-based product Targeting Talk helps school staff todescribe children’s language skills by breaking down speaking and listening targets stillfurther into detailed small steps focused on pupils’ expressive, receptive and social use oflanguage. It also includes a reference bank of successful classroom strategies to promotespeaking and listening skills, as does Bradford’s Talk Across the Curriculum.

Programmes such as Somerset Total Communication, I CAN’s Primary Talk programme andSwindon Local Education Authority’s Speech and Language Friendly School guidelinesprovide useful descriptors for communication-supportive learning environments. Theyalso offer frameworks for early identification and support for children with more persistentdisordered language and, of note, can be delivered at a relatively low cost per head. I CAN,for example, estimates the cost of delivering Primary Talk at around £9,000 a school.

Programmes such as Anne Locke’s One Step at a Time – which is being piloted in SouthWales and Stoke-on-Trent – focus on developing conversation, listening, narrative anddiscussion at foundation stage, key stage one and key stage two. There is evidence thatinterventions such as Becky Shanks’ and Judith Carey’s Speaking and Listening ThroughNarrative, which use small groups to develop children’s language, can result in significantimprovements in children’s ability to understand and tell stories as well as improved classroom listening and attention.

ConclusionThe ability to communicate is the key life skill of the 21st century. Yet the inability to doso is both more widespread than many realise and a serious challenge to decision makersand professionals alike. Speech and language problems are the most common form ofdevelopmental delay in children, affecting 10 times as many children as autism and three times as many as dyslexia.

These problems cannot be ignored or conveniently dismissed as “something that will passwith time”. Left unaddressed, they are inclined to worsen, damaging children’s attainment,threatening their well-being and piling up costly problems for the state as a vicious cycleof intergenerational disadvantage takes root. There are some excellent communicationprogrammes and we have highlighted them in this chapter, but provision is extremelypatchy and the stark reality is that too many children have suffered too much for too long with too little done to help them.

What there is not – but what there needs to be – is an explicit commitment to the


delivery by children’s services across the country of the requisite support to children inearly and primary years. As a matter of urgency, the following messages must be heardand heeded.

Speech and language are just as important as literacy and numeracy. Information aboutgood communication skills and the means to assess them is a prerequisite of improvement,and that information must be disseminated to parents and professionals alike.

Early identification and intervention are the most valuable weapons in the struggle tostop problems becoming endemic and to put children on the path of normal communicationdevelopment. They should be writ large in the priorities of children’s commissioners andservice providers everywhere.

A continuum of services designed around the family is needed. Just as it must include provision for those with the most severe problems, so it must include provision of communication-rich environments for all children in order to defuse the time bomb of inadequate communication skills passing from one generation to the next. Such communication environments demand a major up-skilling of the children’s workforce,which must be taken forward without delay.

Joint working between health and educational professionals is crucial. Operating in separate silos produces misunderstandings, causes divisions and can be bewildering orinfuriating to parents. A renewed drive is required to ensure shared understandingsbetween professionals and the development of collaborative working at strategic andoperational levels alike.

While encouraging local innovation, we need to extend early years’ targets for languageto older children, work towards a national indicator of speech, language and communi-cation and strive to ensure that all children and young people with speech, language andcommunication needs, wherever they live, receive a high-quality service.

The pursuit of improved speech, language and communication should be driven by a number of considerations. First, it is right in itself to do whatever we can to help thosewho suffer from the invisible disability of deficient communication skills. As long ago as1910, Winston Churchill said that “the mood and temper of the public in regard to thetreatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country”. If that is true, it is true in triplicate of our attitude to, and provision for, communication-impaired children and young people.

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Second, we must be motivated by national self-interest. Tackling this country’s speech,language and communication problem is right on so many fronts – it is right for the sakeof fairness, right for educational progress, right for social inclusion, right for employmentgeneration, right for safeguarding mental health, right for reducing offending and rightfor our commercial advantage in an age in which a job for life is a relic of the past and the premium placed upon communication skills in today’s knowledge economy isgreater than ever.

Finally, for far too long communication has been elbowed aside by policy makers focusedon other parts of the children’s agenda. Yet language development is inextricably boundup with that wider agenda of aspiration, opportunity and social harmony. Our challengeis to catapult speech, language and communication from the back of decision makers’minds to the front and to keep the subject there. The ability to communicate is not an optional extra. It is a vital piece of equipment for citizenship, fundamental to our humanity and central to the quest to improve life chances in the 21st century.


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Chapter 3

The need for a focus on literacyand numeracy

Jean Gross, Director of the Every Child a Chance Trust


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The need for a focus on literacy and numeracy

In the first three years of school, educators have their one and only chance to upset thecorrelation between intelligence measures, social class and literacy progress, or betweeninitial progress and later progress.Dame Marie Clay

This chapter highlights the need to include a focus on literacy and numeracy in any earlyintervention strategy aimed at tackling social disadvantage. It argues that children withpoor literacy and numeracy skills are on a certain track to one of the five pathways topoverty described in Iain Duncan Smith’s introduction to this publication – educationalfailure. It also provides evidence on the long-term downstream savings to the public purseresulting from investment in this area, which in the long term will fund upstream costsmany times over.

Typical trajectories

AdamAdam was brought up on a troubled local authority housing estate with endemically highunemployment levels. Neither his parents nor members of his extended family were inwork while he was at school. There were no books at home and opportunities for languagedevelopment were restricted. His parents wanted the best for him, but did not see education as particularly important.

Adam attended nursery class and started “big school” with enthusiasm when he was justfour. He tried hard, but by the end of his second year he had made almost no progresswith reading. By the time he was seven he was well behind his peers and had come to feel,as had his parents before him, that school was not a place where he could succeed. Overthe course of the next few years his behaviour in class became increasingly troublesome.He had help in a group, and by the end of his primary years had made some progress inliteracy but was still well behind his peers.

At secondary school he was placed in lower sets, fell into bad company and ended up ina pupil referral unit for pupils at risk of exclusion. He began to offend and had supportfrom a mentor who encouraged him to enrol on college vocational courses. By now, however, his offending had become serious. He dropped out of college and a few monthslater began the first of several spells in prison.


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KimKim, the youngest of five children, loved school and always tried her best but from thebeginning struggled with some aspects of learning. Her home environment was warm and loving but her everyday experiences were limited; at seven, she had never travelled outside the immediate area she lived in.

She read reasonably well but was not good at thinking of things to write about, or atmaths – she could not seem to understand the number system or remember the simplestnumber facts. She had help in class from a teaching assistant who sat with the lowest-attaining group, but her problems persisted right though her primary school years.

The transition to secondary school proved a major trauma for her, and her attendancebegan to slip. She did badly in exams and left school with few qualifications. For a yearshe worked in retail, until she became pregnant and later married in her early 20s. Soonafter that came a bout of serious depression, and separation from her husband. Kim didnot return to work and brought up the couple’s three children on state benefits.

The social consequences of language, literacy and numeracy failureEach year, 8% of children leave primary school with very low literacy and or/numeracyskills (achieving below level 3 in national curriculum terms, with literacy or mathematicsskills at or below those of the average seven-year-old). These annual numbers – around23,000 children a year with very low levels of both literacy and numeracy, 15,000 withvery low literacy only and 12,000 with very low numeracy only – have remained more or less static over the past 10 years.

While those just below the average have benefited from a relentless focus on increasingthe percentage hitting national targets (national curriculum level 4) at the age of 11, thoseat the very tail end of the distribution curve have not shown equal benefits. As Adam’sand Kim’s stories demonstrate, the social consequences to the individual and society are profound. Children like these (and the children they in turn will parent) make up a high proportion of the dysfunctional core that has been described in earlier chapters. The difficulties they experience reverberate through the system, making heavy demandson education, welfare and health budgets.

We know, for example, that there is a significant link between poor literacy or numeracyand antisocial behaviour. More than half of pupils permanently excluded from school fallinto the lowest 2% of the population for literacy and/or numeracy attainment.1 Pupils

1 Gross, J and McChrystal, M “The Protection of a Statement? Permanent Exclusions and the SEN Code of Practice” inEducational Psychology in Practice vol 17, no 4 (2001)


who enter secondary school with very low literacy skills have an exclusion rate five timesthat of pupils entering at average levels, and are four times more likely to truant. Pupilswith very poor numeracy (but average literacy) carry twice the risk of exclusion and over twice the risk of truancy.2 After controlling for other relevant factors (poverty, family environment, poor educational experiences, early signs of behaviour problems),poor literacy scores are a significant predictor of the number of times males are arrestedover their life course; for women, poor numeracy is the significant predictor.3

Physical and mental health in adulthood, too, are linked to poor basic skills; those whowere poor readers at age 10 have been shown to be more likely than good readers withsimilarly high levels of early social disadvantage to smoke and drink heavily, to be obeseand (for women) to be depressed.4

Labour market outcomes are equally affected. Adults with very low literacy and numeracyskills are, for example, up to eight times more likely to live in a household where bothpartners are out of paid employment than are those with good basic skills.5 Finally, inter-generational persistence of difficulties in basic skills is extremely high. One study foundthat 60% of children in the lowest reading attainment group at age 10 had parents withlow literacy levels, while only 2% had parents with high literacy scores.6

Good early skills, by contrast, have been shown to be a significant predictor of the probability of escape from a disadvantaged background. Data from a 2002 report by theOECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development) shows that children fromthe lowest socioeconomic strata who read for pleasure outperform those in the highestwho do not. Blanden7 sought to explore the characteristics of children from poor backgrounds who buck the trend and go on to achieve economic well-being as adults. She compared a range of test scores (general cognitive ability, reading, maths and shapecopying) at ages five and 10 by adult poverty status. Those who avoided poverty later inlife had in early life performed better on all the measures, but particularly large differenceswere found for vocabulary at age five and the reading test at age 10.

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2 Data supplied by Department for Children, Schools & Families’ Research & Statistics Division3 Parsons, S and Bynner, J Does Numeracy Matter More? (National Research & Development Centre for Adult Literacy &Numeracy, 2005)4 Parsons, S and Bynner, J Basic Skills & Social Exclusion (Basic Skills Agency, 2002)5 Parsons and Bynner, op cit (2005)6 Research at City University, in Moser, C A Fresh Start: Improving Literacy & Numeracy (Department for Education &Employment, 1999)7 Blanden, J Bucking the Trend, working paper no 31 (Department for Work & Pensions, 2006)


What can be done?Disadvantaged children with poor basic skills, such as Adam and Kim, do not need to fail.Effective early intervention schemes can lift them, and others like them, out of failure –and keep them there. The Numbers Count programme, for example, which provides 12weeks of one-to-one teaching for seven-year-olds with numeracy difficulties from ahighly trained specialist teacher, has been shown to lift 83% of the children involved backto average levels for their age, in the poorest areas of London.

In the Every Child a Reader programme, Reading Recovery teaching provides similarintensive short-term help for six-year-olds who have made no progress with reading andwriting. Eight out of 10 children are returned to the levels expected for their age at exitfrom the programme.8 A recently published follow-up study over two years9 showed thatthose taught (the lowest-achieving 5% nationally) outperformed the national average intheir assessment at the end of key stage one, with 86% achieving the reading levelsexpected for their age, compared with 84% of all children in the national cohort, and 57% in a comparison group who did not receive Reading Recovery. Similar results wereachieved for writing.

These are remarkable outcomes, reinforcing the opportunities provided by early interventionto tackle the endemically low achievement of poor children. As the researchers conclude:

Even those children in deprived social and economic, inner-city environments, who hadmade no start into literacy after a year or more in school, can catch up if the right help comes early enough. With access to Reading Recovery this is demonstrably anattainable goal.

What these programmes do is offer disadvantaged children what middle-class parents willarrange for their children if they are falling behind – access to one-to-one teaching froma qualified expert. Note that middle-class parents do not go out and find a teaching assistant to work with the child; they want a specialist teacher. Note too that middle-classparents want and expect the tutors they hire to make sure their children catch up completely with their peers – not just make a modicum of progress.

We need to make it possible for children from poorer families to have the same kind ofopportunities. We cannot be satisfied, or allow schools to be satisfied, with the kind of

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8 KPMG Foundation Every Child A Reader: Results of the Second Year (2007)9 Burroughs-Lange, S Comparison of Literacy Progress of Young Children in London Schools: A Reading RecoveryFollow-up Study (Institute of Education, 2008)


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help they now provide – just because teaching assistants are cheaper than teachers, andgroup help cheaper than one-to-one teaching.

What we need to do is make it possible for children from poorer families to access the kindof help that transforms not only their literacy or numeracy skills but also their attitudesto learning. Reading Recovery and Numbers Count are about showing children how tosolve their own problems rather than depend on others to solve them. They promote abelief that what you can do can make a difference. It is this “internal locus of control” thatwe now know is a crucial factor in determining adult life chances.

How children are helped by Reading RecoveryChildren coming into Reading Recovery are often passive, waiting for answers to be givento them. In their lessons they are praised for independence, and helped to notice thestrategies they have used to tackle problems, using phrases like the following:

Are you a superstar or not? Show me all the times you were stuck and you sorted it.

I’ll tell you what you did that I particularly liked – you solved that problem – when yougot to this word (“can”) you first said “can’t”, then you changed it to “can”.

You chopped up the word into its sounds and put it back together, didn’t you?

This quickly changes children’s attitudes. Jo’s favourite words used to be: “I can’t do that.”After a few Reading Recovery lessons, he successfully reassembled a cut-up sentence. “Did I do that?” he exclaimed in surprise. “I’m like the big boys, I am!”

Shannon is a little girl who before Reading Recovery was very passive and dependent. Hermother used to carry her into school. She would never put her hand up in class and whenassessed for Reading Recovery said: “I don’t know these words. Other people in my classdo.” Recently, when she was asked to run an errand in school, she was heard to say, “I hopeit won’t take too long … I’ve got to get back to my writing.”

Programmes like Reading Recovery and Numbers Count need to be provided early on in primary school, after children have had a good shot at learning basic skills through effective whole-class teaching, but before they have experienced years of failure anddeveloped negative attitudes to learning.

Reading Recovery is targeted at children who have had a year of formal education. In England this means at the age of six; if – as many advocate – there should be a change


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to a later start to formal learning, as in Wales, it would be positioned a year later. Butintervening after a year of formal education, whenever that may be, is more cost-effectivethan waiting until children are older. Then the gap is wider and it takes more time to getchildren back to the level of their peers. Reading Recovery is successful in up to 20 weeks.It has been estimated that “at age eight it would take a year to 18 months of a similarlyintensive programme to bring the attainment of the bottom 20% up to average”.10

Intervention needs to be provided across reading, writing and mathematics, if the chancesof success in education are to be maximised. As figure 1 illustrates, good performance inboth numeracy and literacy at the age of seven (achieving the nationally expected level 2standard) is the best indicator of achievement at GCSEs. Doing well at the age of seven iseven more predictive for children of parents with lower levels of education than it is forother groups – particularly in maths.11 It does not make sense to focus on either numeracyor literacy; an early intervention strategy needs to tackle both, and also the oral languageskills that underpin the ability to comprehend text, to write well, and to understand anduse mathematical language.

Figure 1: Good performance in both literacy and numeracy at age seven as a predictor of GCSE resultsPercentage getting five A*-C grades including English and maths

% c

onve

rtin

g

KS1 level 2 in reading only

(not writing or maths)

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

50%

35%

40%

45%

9.5% 8.9%11.09%

16.8%

45.5%

KS1 level 2 in reading and writing

(not maths)

KS1 level 2 in maths only

(not reading or writing)

KS1 level 2 in writing only

(not reading or maths)

KS1 level 2 in reading,

writing and maths

10 Alakeson, V Too Much, Too Late: Life Chances & Spending on Education & Training (Social Market Foundation, 2005);Wood, C and Caulier-Grice, J Fade or Flourish (Social Market Foundation, 2006)11 Duckworth, K What Role for the Three Rs? Progress & Attainment during Primary School (Centre for Research on theWider Benefits of Learning, 2007)


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Such intervention programmes also need to be highly individualised. Effective whole-class teaching (for example, of speaking and listening skills and of synthetic phonics) isessential if we are to ensure that expensive additional help is targeted at the right pupils– those who have in-built difficulties rather than those who are just casualties of poor initial teaching. Even the very best universal teaching, however, leaves a stubborn core ofpupils whose complex needs and social circumstances mean they will not learn to read,write and count in a class setting12 but do respond very rapidly to a short period of tailored, one-to-one teaching.

Barriers in the systemThe benefits of early literacy and numeracy intervention are clear, but until very recentlyschools were nevertheless not providing it, or were providing it only patchily. As ever, thereasons for this are primarily economic. Intervention that works for these children withcomplex difficulties has to be intensive. It has to enable them to make at least four timesthe “normal” rate of progress, over a short period. This requires a high level of training and skill on the part of the teacher, and a high degree of personalisation.

This is expensive at the point of delivery, for example costing a school approximately£15,000 to £20,000 a year (a half-time teaching post) to implement for each of literacyand numeracy. The later return on this investment, in terms of savings to the Treasury onthe costs of crime, ill health and unemployment, are significant; a report commissionedby the KPMG Foundation13 estimates returns as £11-£16 for every pound spent on Reading Recovery. And between £12 and £19 is returned for every pound spent on effective early numeracy intervention.14 As a nation we spent £7 billion in 2003/04 on education and training for the low-skilled. Within education budgets alone, we know thata secondary school will have to spend more on special needs, truancy and behaviour support for pupils entering with very low literacy or numeracy levels than the costs of early intervention in key stage one.

None of these long-term potential savings, however, are experienced by the primaryschool, which has to find around £2,500 per child per intervention. The gains made bysmall numbers of high-cost, high-risk children may fall below the radar of aggregateschool performance data. The school has to work, moreover, within an accountabilityframework that until recently has incentivised the system to focus resources on pupils

12 MacKay, T Achieving the Vision: The Final Research Report of the West Dunbartonshire Literacy Initiative(West Dunbartonshire Council, 2007); personal communication from Christopher Jolly, managing director of Jolly Learning (Jolly Phonics) 13 KPMG Foundation The Long-term Costs of Literacy Difficulties (2008, 2nd edition, in press) 14 Every Child A Chance Trust The Long-term Costs of Numeracy Difficulties (in press, 2008)


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who are marginally (rather than substantially) below the national targets, and still provides no incentives for achieving pupil progress before the age of seven – indeed,rather the reverse, since schools are rewarded for achieving high “value added” scores overthe course of key stage two, which are harder to achieve if pupils leave key stage one with high attainment.

A particular factor affecting early intervention is the mobility of the child population.Teachers and head teachers often see children leave their school part way through theirhigh-funded intervention programmes, so that the school does not reap the benefit of its investment in its overall results. As one head teacher said:

We had two girls on Reading Recovery – twins. Their house was petrol-bombed and theywere moved to Wales – all that money was wasted.

Given these circumstances, it is unsurprising that schools tend to choose low-cost, low-intensity literacy and numeracy interventions that, although effective for somepupils, do not work for the very lowest attaining.15 They would like to use higher-impactinterventions: for example, a Times Educational Supplement survey in 2005 found thathalf the primary school teachers responding regarded the reintroduction of ReadingRecovery programmes as their top investment priority.

Schools are willing to part-fund the costs from their own budgets, moreover, as long assome external funding is available to match their contribution – for example, from localregeneration budgets. Once such funding ceases, however, schools are not usually able to sustain the programmes.

The clearest evidence of this was provided in the 1990s, when a Conservative governmentbrought Reading Recovery to the UK and funded it for three years, expecting that afterthis pump-priming period schools would pick up the costs themselves. This did not in general prove to be the case. Unless the accountability system is radically revised to favouroutcomes for the lowest-achieving pupils, a safety net of external earmarked funding,from either national or local government, is likely to be needed for the most vulnerable.

15 Hatcher, P et al “Efficacy of Small Group Reading Intervention for Beginning Readers with Reading-delay: ARandomised Controlled Trial” in Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry no 47 (2006); Hurry, J Intervention Strategiesto Support Children with Difficulties in Literacy during Key Stage 1: Review of Research (Institute of Education, 2000);Torgesen, J et al National Assessment of Title I: Interim Report Volume II: Closing the Reading Gap (2006)


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Changing the systemIn 2005 the Every Child A Reader programme was established to explore some of the barriers to effective early literacy intervention. The three-year, £10 million scheme wasfunded by a partnership of businesses and charitable trusts, with matched funding fromgovernment. Interestingly, the initial impetus for the programme – as in the Colorado programmes described in the first monograph in this series – came from philanthropicallymotivated business people (in this case the KPMG Foundation), working in partnershipwith academics, local authorities and schools.

From the beginning, the aim was to unlock sustainable and long-term investment. In thisaim the initiative has been successful, with the programme quickly growing from 60 to500 schools, and securing a commitment from government to a national roll-out inEngland in 2008-11, reaching 30,000 children a year with Reading Recovery by the end ofthat period. A similar business- and charitable-led coalition is now involved in the EveryChild Counts parallel early intervention programme for numeracy, this time with government asthe major funder and committing in advance to a national roll-out of the Numbers Countteaching scheme if the initiative is successful.

The lesson to be learned from these programmes is that it is possible to put in placeupstream investment in early intervention, in order to prevent downstream costs, givenan external impetus from bodies that are able to look beyond short political time frames,given the energy and enterprise resulting from partnership between public, private andthird sectors – and given a sound, quantitative evidence base for the intervention proposed.

Programmes such as Every Child A Reader and Every Child Counts, however, have aninherent fragility. Charities and the business sector can provide an initial impetus, but are not positioned to provide an early intervention system with sufficient reach and sustainability to guarantee entitlement for all at-risk children, wherever they happen togo to school. This has to be the business of government, both national and local. But oncegovernment in any shape is in the driving seat, effective programmes run the risk ofbureaucratisation, losing energy once schools perceive them as top-down directives.

Work is now under way with the Every Child A Reader and Every Child Counts businesspartners to explore the possibilities of maintaining a part-private, part-public system thatinvolves local businesses in investing in their community primary schools, topping up established government funding for early intervention and linking it to employee volunteering. If this works, it could provide a powerful model for the future.

A final challenge for policy makers is securing an alignment between early intervention in


language, literacy and numeracy and intervention that addresses wider children’s issues.Early evidence from Every Child A Reader and Every Child Counts suggests that the effectiveness of both programmes (in terms of success rate, throughput and long-termmaintenance of children’s gains) could be substantially enhanced by simultaneous access,for those children who need it, to those other evidence-based early interventions referredto in this booklet which tackle other common side effects of social disadvantage – behavioural difficulties, poor school attendance and lack of parental support for learning.

Effective interventions of this nature, such as parenting and school-home support programmes, are already (patchily) used in the early primary years, but nowhere has therebeen a sustained attempt to bring them together with language, literacy and numeracymeasures. If this were to be tested in target communities where a small number of primary schools feed into a single secondary school and the population mobility is relatively low, it would be possible to track the effects over time, both for at-risk individuals and on the communities they live in. Again, such an exercise could generate a scalable model for wider application by national and local government, on a “spend to save” basis.

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Chapter 4

Developing social and emotionalskills in schools to help combatdisadvantage

Professor Katherine Weare, Emeritus Professor at the University of Southampton


Developing social and emotional skills in schools to help combat disadvantage

We need children who learn how to communicate their feelings, interact successfully withothers, resolve conflicts peaceably, control their anger and negotiate their way throughthe many complex relationships in their lives, today and tomorrow.Reva Klein1

Social and emotional skills are the skills of making positive relationships with other people, of understanding and managing ourselves and our own emotions, thoughts and behaviour, and of understanding and responding effectively to the emotions andbehaviour of others.

Social and emotional skills are now known to be as important as intellectual skills in shaping personal, educational and career success. Employers repeatedly complain thatnew recruits may be technically skilled but lack the social and emotional skills they needto relate to others in teamwork situations, communicate effectively and motivate andmanage themselves. This is particularly true for those from deprived backgrounds.

This chapter outlines the need to include a concern with emotional and social skills in anyearly intervention strategy to tackle the cycle of social disadvantage. It argues that childrenwith poor emotional and social skills are more likely to experience all kinds of failure, butthat there is a good deal we can do to rectify the situation, particularly through schools.

Acquiring social and emotional skills Social and emotional skills are, for most young children, learned initially through theexperience of growing up in a stable family and community, where people treat oneanother with warmth and respect, with parents who have time to play and interact withtheir children, where discipline is calm and consistent, where rules and boundaries arepositive and realistic and expectations are high.

The vital capacities these well-nurtured children begin to learn include both personal andinterpersonal skills:

• self-understanding, having a positive and accurate sense of yourself, acknowledgingyour own strengths as well as recognising your responsibility towards others, andbeing realistic about your limitations;

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1 Klein, R Defying Disaffection (Trentham Books, 2000)


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• understanding and managing feelings, such as knowing how to soothe yourself whenyou are troubled or angry, cheer yourself up when you are sad, and tolerate somedegree of frustration;

• motivation, showing optimism, persistence and resilience in the face of difficulties,planning and setting goals;

• social skills of communication, getting along with others, solving social problems,and standing up for yourself; and

• empathy, being able to see the world from other people’s point of view, understandand enjoy differences, and pay attention and listen to others.

Social and emotional skills and deprivation – a vicious cycle Acquiring social and emotional skills does not happen automatically; on the contrary, thisdevelopment is strongly shaped, even at the level of the neural pathways of the brain, bythe child’s environment.2 Helping children acquire these skills is likely to be difficult forparents living in deprived circumstances. The kind of good parenting that encouragessound development is not of course confined to the better-off in society, nor are well-heeled parents always good ones, by any means. However, it is true to say that a disadvantaged background is highly likely to make positive parenting more difficult.

Poor social and emotional skills are not only risk factors for deprivation, making it hard for people to pull themselves out of their problems, but also in turn are caused by the experience of deprivation – it is a vicious circle. Parents in deprived conditions may find it difficult to give the positive attention that is needed to build attachments with their children. They may feel alienated from a child they did not want, be depressed by their circumstances or not be functioning socially and emotionally because of drugs or alcohol.The effect of this lack of attachment is disastrous for the child’s emotional, social, cognitive and physical development.3

Disadvantage directly affects the development of self-efficacy. Many disadvantaged parents and carers start out as parents feeling depressed and hopeless, with an image ofthemselves as failures. The stress of poverty and poor housing, often as a single parent,living in run-down and violent neighbourhoods, adds to this feeling of worthlessness andof having no ability to control events. It is not then surprising that teenagers who growup in poverty are more likely to feel they are failures or that they are “useless”. Parents

2 Denham, SA, and Weissberg, RP “Social-Emotional Learning in Early Childhood: What We Know and Where to Go fromHere” in Chesebrough, E, King, P, Gullotta, TP and Bloom, M (eds) A Blueprint for the Promotion of Prosocial Behavior inEarly Childhood (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004) (http://www.casel.org/downloads/SELearlychildhood.pdf)3 Barlow, J and Underdown, A “Attachment and Infant Development” in Jackson, C, Hill, K and Lewis, P (eds) Child & Adolescent Mental Health Today: A Handbook (Ashford Press/Young Minds, 2008)


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from more disadvantaged backgrounds are particularly unlikely to be able to help theirchildren manage their feelings in calm, positive, rational ways. They are likely to use punitive, inconsistent and aggressive approaches to discipline, based on shouting, slapping and even violence.4 They are also more likely to be isolated, seldom venturingoutside the immediate vicinity. The children will thus find it difficult to develop socialskills. Social relationships in the crowded and chaotic contexts of deprived homes andneighbourhoods are often at best strained, and at worst abusive and violent. In thesestraitened conditions, people find it hard to experience a sense of empathy or concern for others; they are too busy surviving.

Social and emotional skills can be developed by schools The picture for some children in deprived areas may be bleak, but there is hope. Chapterfive in this monograph describes what can be done if we invest in programmes that tackleparenting difficulties. But evidence is also emerging, from evaluations of the rapidly growing number of social and emotional learning programmes across the world, that it ispossible to work directly with children themselves to make a difference to their social andemotional skills once they reach school, including developing the skills of children whostart off from a very low base.

In the US there are possibly thousands of social and emotional education programmes –by no means all effective, but they include a few big hitters that systematic reviews usingrigorous evaluation criteria have shown to be highly effective. The majority of these target deprived areas and communities.

In the UK a wide range of specific interventions and approaches have been tried. Someschools and local authorities have been using successful US models, such as PromotingAlternative Thinking Strategies, Second Step, Penn Resiliency, and the Dino DinosaurCurriculum. Other authorities, such as Southampton and Cumbria, have been using programmes they devised themselves.

In an attempt to consolidate work in this area and provide clear entitlement for all pupils,over the last five years government has involved practitioners in developing explicit programmes for England that cover the full age range, under the description “social andemotional aspects of learning” (SEAL). SEAL teaching is based on a careful review of theevidence for what makes programmes effective. The primary SEAL programme (ages fourto 11) is now reasonably well established and evaluations are showing some encouraging

4 Webster-Stratton, C and Hammond, M “Conduct Problems and Level of Social Competence in Head Start Children:Prevalence, Pervasiveness, and Associated Risk Factors” in Clinical Child & Family Psychology Review vol 1, no 2 (1998),pp101-124 (http://www.springerlink.com/content/104849/?p=783c80bb0c3a4263ac9a317ef1cc77d3&pi=0)


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results, including clear effects on behaviour and learning.5

Reviews of programmes, including SEAL, are creating a convincing evidence base on the impact of all these programmes, using the most rigorous and exacting methods,including controlled trials.6 There is growing evidence that social and emotional learningcan result in gains such as: better behaviour and attendance; reduced violence and crime;lower levels of stress and anxiety; higher morale, performance and retention of staff; anda more positive school ethos.

For example, a UK review of universal (whole school) approaches found 17 that stood upto its rigorous criteria.7 These programmes reduced aggression, depression, and commonlyaccepted risk factors associated with the cycle of deprivation, such as impulsiveness andantisocial behaviour, and developed the competences that promote emotional and socialwell-being, such as co-operation, resilience, a sense of optimism, empathy and a positiveand realistic self-concept.

Schools are finding that a welcome side effect of work on social and emotional learningis its ability to enhance academic learning. Some well-known programmes in the US havebeen shown to have demonstrable and measurable effects on attainments of all pupils in reading, non-verbal reasoning, problem solving and planning, languages, learning-to-learn skills and maths.8

Key features A SEAL “lesson” in a primary school might involve learning about:

• working together – children working in groups to design and make a welcome pack ofinformation they can give to any new person joining the school for the first time;

5 Hallam, S, Rhamie, J and Shaw, J Evaluation of the Primary Behaviour & Attendance Pilot (University ofLondon/Department for Education & Skills, 2006)6 Weare, K and Gray, G What Works in Developing Children’s Emotional & Social Competence & Wellbeing? (Universityof Southampton/Department for Education & Skills, 2003) (http://www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR456.pdf);Greenberg, MT, Weissberg, RP, O’Brien, MU, Zins, JE, Fredericks, L, Resnik, H and Elias, MJ “Enhancing School-basedPrevention and Youth Development through Coordinated Social, Emotional and Academic Learning” in AmericanPsychologist vol 58, no 6/7 (2003), pp466-474 (http://www.casel.org/downloads/AmericanPsychologist2003.pdf);Collaborative for Academic, Social & Emotional Learning The Benefits of School-based Social & Emotional LearningPrograms: Highlights from a Forthcoming CASEL Report (2007) (http://www.casel.org/downloads/metaanalysissum.pdf);Wells, J, Barlow, J and Stewart-Brown, S “A Systematic Review of Universal Approaches to Mental Health Promotion inSchools” in Health Education vol 103, no 4 (2003), pp197-2207 Wells, Barlow and Stewart-Brown, op cit8 Zins, JE, Weissberg, RP, Wang, MC and Walberg, H Building Academic Success on Social & Emotional Learning(Teachers College of Columbia, 2004)


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• sticking at things that take effort and perseverance – children setting themselves asimple goal or target, and learning how to break it down into small steps they cantackle one at a time;

• how to control themselves when they are angry – children using an image of afirework, a lighted fuse and a bucket of water to help them understand how angerworks. They listen to an Angry Arthur story and practise some simple steps they cantake to calm themselves down;

• bullying – a class planning and conducting a survey to find out the places in theschool building or grounds where children in the school feel vulnerable to bullying,and using computer software to present their findings as a map; and

• getting on together – children exploring name calling by ranking the names childrenoften call each other from most to least hurtful, enabling them to hear directly howothers feel when they are called names.

Dedicated sessions like these need to be set in a whole-school environment that gives childrenthe opportunity to see skills modelled consistently by adults, and to apply and practise theirlearning. Reviews have shown that the kinds of school environment that promote emotionaland social skills balance four key features: relationships, participation, autonomy and clarity.9

Warm relationships place the emotional well-being of all school members at the heart ofthe educational process. Everyone has a genuine sense of belonging, and feels valued, listened to and respected. There is zero tolerance not just of bullying and violence but alsoof sarcasm and belittling. Linked with this is a sense of genuine participation – a feeling ofengagement and ownership by all, and the fostering of genuine partnerships between pupils,staff, parents, the community, outside agencies, and education and mental health agencies.

The school ethos needs to encourage a sense of autonomy – independence, self-determi-nation, reflection, critical thinking and self-control. Pupils and staff are empowered to makereal choices, and have appropriate levels of genuine decision making and responsibility. Toachieve all this also demands clarity about discipline, rules and boundaries. Behaviour andactions have real-life, known rewards and consequences, both positive and negative.

Involving parents is essential – several major reviews of emotional and social educationprogrammes in the US10 showed that programmes which actively involve parents, the local

9 Weare, K Promoting Mental, Emotional & Social Health: A Whole School Approach (Routledge, 2000)10 Catalano, RF, Berglund, L, Ryan, AM, Lonczak, HS, Hawkins, J “Positive Youth Development in the United States:Research Finding on Evaluations of Positive Youth Development Programmes” in Prevention & Treatment vol 5, no 1(2002); Durlak, J and Wells, A “Primary Prevention Mental Health Programs for Children and Adolescents: A Meta-analyticReview” in American Journal of Community Psychology vol 25, no 2 (1997), pp115–152


community and key local agencies are more likely to have an effect on student learningand behaviour. SEAL, for example has produced materials to support parents which haveproved very useful.

Providing social and emotional education for all It is important that work on social and emotional skills is not just targeted at those withproblems, but that there is a basic entitlement for all. There is strong evidence that thishas a preventive function to avoid the onset of problems or reduce their severity orlongevity, and that it provides a context which helps to meet the needs of those withproblems more effectively than does targeting alone. There are several reasons why thisshould be the case.

Emotional, behavioural and social problems are extremely widespread – they are by no means minority problems. The same risk and protective factors predict more or less the whole range of problems in children and adolescents, from teenage pregnancy to school failure.

Constructing the climate and procedures makes it less likely that children will have problems in the first place, and enables schools to spot any problems early and deal withthem before they become ingrained. The more people there are in the school who areemotionally and socially competent, the easier it will be to help those with more acuteproblems.

It is reassuring to know that universal programmes are far from being a waste of time forpupils with higher levels of social and emotional abilities – the evidence is clear that everyone in a school can benefit from having their emotional and social skillsenhanced.11

Plus effective targeting There are children – often from more deprived backgrounds – who, by virtue of compromised development and the presence of risk processes or the absence of resilience,require additional support.

The key to successful targeted work with these children is making sure that the extra helpthey are receiving is congruent with the work across the whole school, so they get “more

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11 Weare and Gray, op cit; Collaborative for Academic, Social & Emotional Learning, op cit; Zins, Weissberg, Wang andWalberg, op cit; Weare, K Developing the Emotionally Literate School (Sage, 2006)12 Rutter, M, Hagel, A and Giller, H Anti-social Behaviour & Young People (Cambridge University Press, 1998)


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but not different”.12 They will need careful assessment of their needs and a well-constructedprogramme to support them. Teaching assistants may be helpful to support their learningin mainstream class, and withdrawal into some small group (or even one-to-one) workmay also be indicated, although schools need to be careful not to let pupils reinforce oneanother’s poor behaviour in a small group. Having clear contracts with children and parents, and using coaching and buddying, can help.

Barriers Work on social and emotional learning is subject to a great deal of demonising and stereo-typing, sometimes by schools, more often in the media and by some academics who aresmall in number but highly vocal.13 It is sometimes presented as at best a waste of timeand at worst a conspiracy to brainwash the nation’s youth into conformity, undermine thenation’s backbone and meddle with children’s psyches by turning teachers into therapists.

These criticisms are unfounded in relation to the kind of work recommended here, beingbased on a concept of social and emotional learning that is not represented by effectiveprogrammes, including SEAL, nor true of the targeted approaches to mental health currently being developed – all of which are highly evidence-based. The criticisms areoften mischievous, but they can be very damaging and undermining of a valuable but still embryonic development that is only just starting to take hold in the UK.

Another key barrier to developing children’s social and emotional skills is simply lack of investment. Government funding so far, though welcome, has been a fraction of that poured into helping schools meet literacy and numeracy targets. Large sums go to “catch-up” classes in these areas, but nothing similar to children who need extra help tocatch up with social and emotional learning. Initial teacher training largely ignores the subject. There is funding via the Learning & Skills Council for family literacy andnumeracy, but not for family SEAL. Schools also need financial support to train staff toexpert level, and to network with other schools to improve practice.

Some local authorities have shown what can be done with extra investment. They recognisethat investing upstream in social and emotional learning in childhood will produce substantial savings in the downstream costs of providing services to the damaged and disaffected. The city of Nottingham, for example, invested £850,000 of regeneration

13 Ecclestone, K and Hayes, D The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (Routledge, 2009)(http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/202-1036397-3610259?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Kathryn%20Ecclestone)


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money to enable leading practice primary schools to develop high levels of staff expertiseand provide direct help to partner primaries. The outcome has been an exemplary implementation with a profound effect on a generation of children.

ConclusionIncreasingly, we are recognising that emotional and social capacities are at the heart ofpositive human development and effective social groups and communities, and we arehelping people to harness their emotional and social skills to improve their life chancesand relationships with others.

However, some deprived groups are being left outside this mainstream movement, hampered by poor emotional and social skills. It is vital then that we include emotionaland social skills learning in our attempts to address social disadvantage and deprivation,as without it all our efforts to improve the future of all our children, and create a moreequitable society, will lack heart and foundation.


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Chapter 5

Effective parenting interventions – breaking thecycle of disadvantage by helpingtroubled families

Professor Frances Gardner, Professor of Child and Family Psychologyin the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Oxford


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Effective parenting interventions – breaking the cycle of disadvantage by helping troubled families

Recent MORI polls show that 35% of children say their parents do not make them feelloved and cared for.Findings from recent MORI studies (2006)

Natasha is a single parent. She feels she cannot manage her son Josh, who is four andseems to fight over everything she wants him to do. Often she feels like giving up, and isbecoming quite depressed. Josh reminds her of his father, who left when Josh was a baby,and has been in and out of prison. The health visitor, when visiting the home, reports thathis mother ignores Josh until he becomes annoying and destructive to get her attention.He is allowed to wander and play in the streets on his own with older kids, and sometimeshis mother does not know where he is. Josh attended a good nursery school, but therewere no parenting programmes available to help his mother.

Upon reaching primary school, Josh has poor concentration and is disruptive in class. Hecontinues to have difficulties in school over the years, and truants with friends from age13 onwards. He leaves school at 16 without a job or GCSEs. At age 17 he is convicted fora serious assault on a neighbour, following an argument.

Jackie lives on the same large housing estate as Natasha, and tells her own story:

I’m a single parent – I have Kevin who is six and Sally who is nine; both me and Sally feelcontrolled by Kevin, who rules the house with his aggressive and boisterous behaviour; hehardly ever does what he is told; he has awful tantrums, like when I try to get him to goto bed, or turn off the telly. He swears, kicks, bites and spits.

I was at the end of my tether when my health visitor suggested a referral to a parentingclass [Incredible Years programme, in the voluntary sector]. I wanted to get me back incharge; I wanted help and support to turn things around.

The programme was great – I wanted to hear ideas from other parents, and to feel I wasn’tthe only one with these problems. I learned how to relate better to Kevin, how to have fun withhim again. It gave me strategies and confidence to discipline him better. I’ve stopped want-ing to hit him. His teachers say his behaviour and concentration have improved in school.

The importance of parenting Poor parenting is strongly linked to a multitude of problems for children: delinquency,


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drug use, school failure, family violence, abuse of children, poor mental and physicalhealth, and continuing social disadvantage for children as they grow up.1 Good parentingis linked to school success and healthy, positive adjustment.2

Poor parenting – especially in the context of family stress and disadvantage – is one ofthe key reasons why some children develop behaviour problems, and why these problemspersist. The good news is that teaching parenting skills is also one of the best ways weknow both for preventing these problems from occurring, and for improving them afterthey have become troublesome. And the evidence base for this is exceptionally strong.

Why does problem behaviour matter? In many ways, this is obvious: problem behaviour (often termed “antisocial” or “disruptive”behaviour or “conduct problems”) is costly and troublesome for society. Both the humancost to families, peers, schools and communities, and the public cost to our systems ofeducation, criminal justice and healthcare, are enormous.3

One study showed, for example, that by age 28, antisocial 10-year-olds in London hadincurred costs to public services that were 10 times greater than the costs for other children.4 The costs were high to every system of public service, but especially the justicesystem, education and social services residential care. It is easy to see how prevention ofantisocial behaviour in childhood could result in large cost savings, over many years.

Less obviously, problem behaviour, even in young children, tends to persist across the lifecourse; children showing early problem behaviour are at higher risk of later being

1 Loeber, R and Stouthamer-Loeber, M “Family Factors as Correlates and Predictors of Juvenile Conduct Problems andDelinquency” in Tonry, M and Morris, N (eds) Crime & Justice: A Review of Research vol 7 (University of Chicago Press,1986), pp29-149; Stewart-Brown, S, Fletcher, L and Wadsworth, M “Parent–child Relationships and Health Problems inAdulthood in Three UK National Birth Cohort Studies” in European Journal of Public Health no 15 (2005), pp640-646;Farrington, D, Sutton, C and Utting, D (eds) Support from the Start: Working with Young Children & their Families toReduce the Risks of Crime & Antisocial Behaviour (Department for Education & Skills, 2004)2 Farrington, Sutton and Utting, op cit; Dretzke, J, Frew, E, Davenport, C, Barlow, J, Stewart-Brown, S, Sandercock, J,Bayliss, S, Raftery, J, Hyde, C and Taylor, R “The Effectiveness and Cost-effectiveness of Parent Training/EducationProgrammes for the Treatment of Conduct Disorder, including Oppositional Defiant Disorder, in Children” in HealthTechnology Assessment no 9 (2005); Gardner, F, Burton, J and Klimes, I “Randomised Controlled Trial of a ParentingIntervention in the Voluntary Sector for Reducing Child Conduct Problems: Outcomes and Mechanisms of Change” inJournal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry no 47 (2006), pp1,123-1,132; Hutchings, J, Bywater, T, Daley, D, Gardner, F,Whitaker, C, Jones, K, Eames, C and Edwards, RT “Parenting Intervention in Sure Start Services for Children at Risk ofDeveloping Conduct Disorder: Pragmatic Randomised Controlled Trial” in BMJ no 334 (2007), pp678-6853 Farrington, Sutton and Utting, op cit; Scott, S, Knapp, M, Henderson, J and Maughan, B “Financial Cost of SocialExclusion: Follow Up Study of Antisocial Children into Adulthood” in BMJ no 323 (2001), pp191-1984 Scott, Knapp, Henderson and Maughan, op cit


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delinquents.5 This is illustrated by a population-based study in New Zealand,6 which found thatchildren showing severe antisocial behaviour at age seven were 20 times as likely to participatein criminal behaviour by age 26. A British study7 found that even three-year-olds who aretroublesome have a 50% chance of showing marked behaviour problems five years later.

Not only is problem behaviour stable across the life course, it also affects the next generation. There is compelling evidence from intergenerational studies showing thatproblem behaviour is one of the key ways in which disadvantage is transmitted acrossgenerations. For example, in a recent study in Oregon,8 boys who experienced harsh parenting were more likely to become delinquent, more likely to become teen fathers, andmore likely to engage in partner violence. In fact, this combination of harsh parenting andteen problem behaviour was the biggest predictor of the boys engaging in family violencein the next generation, over and above factors like poverty or poor education. In a UK longitudinal study of Camberwell boys,9 having a criminally convicted father by the age of 10 was the biggest predictor of boys’ teenage delinquency.

How serious is the problem? The problems that result from poor parenting are common and have been on the increasein recent decades; there have been steep rises in antisocial behaviour, poor mental healthand drug use. Collishaw and colleagues found a doubling of the rate of adolescent conduct problems, from 7% to 15% of the population, and a near-doubling of depressionand anxiety, in the UK birth cohort data.10 Other societal changes – including the risingdivorce rate, parental stress and working patterns, and increasing consumerism – all conspire to make the job of parenting more difficult, especially for those living in the mostimpoverished and broken communities. On the good side, as we will see, a great deal isknown about how to change parenting and hence child problem behaviour.11

What really works in changing parenting and child outcomes The hopeful message is that there is very strong and rigorous evidence to show we can

5 Farrington, Sutton and Utting, op cit 6 Fergusson, D, Horwood, L and Ridder, E “Show Me a Child at Seven: The Consequences of Conduct Problems in Childhoodfor Psychosocial Functioning in Adulthood” in Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry no 46 (2005), pp837-8497 Richman, M, Stevenson, J and Graham, PJ Pre-school to School: A Behavioral Study (Academic Press, 1982)8 Capaldi, DM and Clark, S “Prospective Family Predictors of Aggression toward Female Partners for At-risk Young Men”in Developmental Psychology no 34 (1998), pp1,175-1,1889 Farrington, DP and Welsh, BC “Saving Children from a Life of Crime: Early Risk Factors & Effective Interventions(Oxford University Press, 2007)10 Collishaw, S, Maughan, B and Goodman, R “Time Trends in Adolescent Mental Health” in Journal of Child Psychology& Psychiatry no 45 (2004), pp1,350-1,36211 Farrington, Sutton and Utting, op cit; Dretzke, Frew, Davenport, Barlow, Stewart-Brown, Sandercock, Bayliss, Raftery,Hyde and Taylor, op cit


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12 Gardner, Burton and Klimes, op cit; Hutchings, Bywater, Daley, Gardner, Whitaker, Jones, Eames and Edwards, op cit;Scott, S, Spender, Q, Doolan, M, Jacobs, B and Aspland, H “Multicentre Controlled Trial of Parenting Groups forChildhood Antisocial Behavior in Clinical Practice” in BMJ no 323 (2001), pp194-20313 Webster-Stratton, C “Preventing Conduct Problems in Head Start Children: Strengthening Parenting Competencies”in Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology no 66 (1998), pp715-730; Sanders, MR, Markie-Dadds, C, Tully, LA andBor, W “The Triple P Positive Parenting Program: A Comparison of Enhanced, Standard, and Self-directed BehavioralFamily Intervention for Parents of Children with Early Onset Conduct Problems” in Journal of Consulting & ClinicalPsychology no 68 (2000), pp624-64014 Farrington, Sutton and Utting, op cit; Dretzke, Frew, Davenport, Barlow, Stewart-Brown, Sandercock, Bayliss, Raftery,Hyde and Taylor, op cit; Barlow, J, Coren, E and Stewart-Brown, SSB “Parent-training Programmes for ImprovingMaternal Psychosocial Health” in Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews no 4 (2003)15 Farrington, Sutton and Utting, op cit 16 Gardner, Burton and Klimes, op cit; Hutchings, Bywater, Daley, Gardner, Whitaker, Jones, Eames and Edwards, op cit;Scott, Spender, Doolan, Jacobs and Aspland, op cit; Scott, S, O’Connor, T and Furth, A What Makes ParentingProgrammes Work in Disadvantaged Areas? The PALS Trial (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2006); Sutton, C “ParentTraining by Telephone: A Partial Replication” in Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapy no 23 (1995), pp1-24

change parenting and improve child outcomes, even in very disadvantaged families withentrenched problems. This message is based on data from over 100 randomised controlledtrials, conducted in the UK12 and elsewhere.13 Systematic reviews of these trials demonstrate the effectiveness of well-structured parenting interventions for improvingparenting skills, for reducing child problem behaviour and for improving maternal mentalhealth.14 Most of the proven interventions are based on cognitive-behavioural principles,and many employ well-known programmes with well-established dissemination mecha-nisms, such as Carolyn Webster-Stratton’s Incredible Years, and Matt Sanders’ Triple P.

To be most effective, intervention needs to be early. We are all creatures of habit; for bothparents and children, the longer we practise patterns of interacting together, the moredifficult these are to change. Furthermore, if a parent experiences their child as hard tomanage over a prolonged period of time, they may come to develop negative attitudestowards the child, and a sense of hopelessness about change.

It may also be important to capitalise on developmental transitions – for example, for parents it is a big change when their baby becomes a mobile, assertive and risk-takingtoddler; or for the child, it is a significant move from home into nursery or primary school.Often these are times when parents perceive new challenges in parenting, and thereforeseek help and information; they may also be more receptive to input from preventive services. For all these reasons, early intervention is preferable to late.15

Importantly, there is a long history in Britain of using these interventions, and there areseveral British randomised controlled trials showing that these programmes work in UKservices – in the voluntary sector, in multiple Sure Start services, in clinics, in primaryschools, and on the telephone.16


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Three British randomised trials have shown clear effectiveness of the Incredible Years parenting programme in community settings, compared with waiting-list control groups,who were offered the intervention six months later.

One trial17 was based in a voluntary-sector organisation dedicated to offering parentingprogrammes to vulnerable families experiencing severe problems with parenting, childmaltreatment and behavioural problems. The intervention was offered in six communitysites serving large housing estates and other low-income neighbourhoods in Oxfordshire.Families of two- to nine-year-olds showing problem behaviour were referred by healthvisitors, social workers, teachers and GPs. Parents attended a 14-week programme in local church halls and community centres. Childcare and food were provided to facilitateattendance.

The results showed marked improvements in child problem behaviour and parenting skills– not only according to the parents’ reports, but also by the ratings of independentobservers who assessed parent-child interactions in the home. Parent satisfaction wasvery high, and all these gains were maintained at 18-month follow-up. A second Britishtrial was also based in real-life family services, this time across multiple Sure Start agencies serving low-income neighbourhoods in North Wales,18 one of the poorest regionsin the UK and the EU. This time the programme was based on “high risk” prevention: pre-school children in Sure Start areas were screened by health visitors; parents of thoseshowing early signs of problem behaviour were invited to take part in the 12-week programme.

Again, results showed improvements in both parenting skills and child problem behaviour,by parents’ and observers’ reports, and these gains were maintained over two years.Mothers’ depression also improved – vital for ensuring maintenance of gains. Reducingdepression also helps women to a better life in other realms that are crucial for their children, such as employment, housing and adult relationships.

Together with a third trial in inner-city London clinics carried out by Stephen Scott andhis colleagues,19 these evaluations show that well-structured parenting programmes canwork to change patterns of behaviour for a range of troubled families, when delivered bywell-trained staff from a wide range of backgrounds – including social workers, nurserystaff and health visitors.

17 Gardner, Burton and Klimes, op cit 18 Hutchings, Bywater, Daley, Gardner, Whitaker, Jones, Eames and Edwards, op cit 19 Scott, Spender, Doolan, Jacobs and Aspland, op cit


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Can these programmes reach the hardest to reach?If they are done well, using a high-quality programme, delivered with fidelity, the messageis very encouraging. Gardner and colleagues in North Wales in 200820 found that thepoorest and most troubled Sure Start families who enrolled in their parenting programmesdid as well, or even better, than better-off families.

There is some evidence about ethnic-minority groups in the UK: Stephen Scott found thesame programme to be effective in community clinics with multi-ethnic families in south London.21 There is a good deal of US data suggesting that these programme areapplicable for families from ethnic minorities: one study22 found that the Incredible Yearsprogramme was equally effective and acceptable for parents and children in a large sample of white, compared with black, Asian and Hispanic, families in the US.

There is still, however, always a risk that parenting support may not reach those who need it most. We know from the first Sure Start evaluation23 that services – even when conveniently located within low-income neighbourhoods – often find it easier to recruitand engage families who are better-off socially and financially.

Judy Hutchings24 describes clearly how parenting interventions in North Wales Sure Startsucceeded on this front. First they needed to have a workable recruitment strategy, targeting the right families, and using existing local provision. For this they used healthvisitors, trained to offer brief screening for behavioural difficulties. Second, to ensure families could afford to attend, they offered transport, food and a crèche, as well as locations and times of day to suit local families. It is likely these factors explain why good programmes can be as effective, or more so, with the most troubled families.25

In order to reach marginalised families, we need to pay attention to the user-friendlinessof our facilities and our approaches to parents. However, in so doing we must not losesight of the importance of the quality of delivery of the programme itself. Only throughhigh-quality training and continuing supervision will the programme be delivered in the

20 Gardner, F, Hutchings, J and Bywater, T “Who Benefits and How Does It Work? Moderators and Mediators ofOutcomes in a Randomised Trial of Parenting Interventions in Multiple ‘Sure Start’ Services” (under review, 2008)21 Scott, Spender, Doolan, Jacobs and Aspland, op cit 22 Reid, MJ, Webster-Stratton, C and Beauchaine, T “Parent Training in Head Start: A Comparison of Program Responseamong African-American, Asian-American, Caucasian, and Hispanic Mothers” in Prevention Science no 2 (2001), pp209-22723 Belsky, J, Melhuish, E, Barnes, J, Leyland, AH and Romaniuk, H “Effects of Sure Start Local Programmes on Childrenand Families: Early Findings from a Quasi-experimental, Cross-sectional Study” in BMJ no 332 (2006), pp1,476-1,47824 Hutchings, J, Bywater, T and Daley, D “Early Prevention of Conduct Disorder: How and Why Did the North and Mid-Wales Sure Start Study Work?” in Journal of Children’s Services no 2 (2007), pp4-1525 Hutchings, J, Lane, E and Gardner, F “Making Evidence-based Intervention Work” in Farrington, Sutton and Utting, op cit


ways that we know to be effective.26 If the programme is not adhered to, it may becomean unfocused discussion session, which will not help improve child and family outcomes.

Costs and benefits The costs of effective programmes are modest compared with the huge cost of antisocialbehaviour outlined earlier. For example, health economists costed the Incredible Years programme in North Wales Sure Start at £1,300 per child,27 concluding that “this parentingprogramme involves modest costs and demonstrates strong clinical effect, suggesting itwould represent good value for money for public spending”.

A promising possibility for enhancing cost-effectiveness is that some families may be wellsuited to briefer, low-cost version of these interventions – provided we can show that theywork. Triple P has developed media-based versions of its programme which are deliveredusing parent booklets and worksheets, with the principles brought to life through well-chosen video material. Recently this programme has also been delivered and evaluated28

via a six-episode national television series in England – ITV’s Driving Mum and Dad Mad.

A systematic review29 for the Cochrane Collaboration of randomised trials of brief bookletand video interventions showed they were effective in reducing child problem behaviour.In some cases, effect sizes were smaller than with conventional face-to-face interven-tions. However, they have great potential for widespread dissemination of parenting skills,reaching far larger numbers of families. And this makes these worthy of further testing indisadvantaged populations.

What should local and national government be doing? The Welsh Assembly government, after seeing the results of the North Wales Sure Starttrial,30 has funded training and supervision of staff from all 22 of its local authorities to implement the Incredible Years programme widely in children’s services – such as in schools, nurseries and Sure Start centres. This is a good example of how politicians, policy makers and multiple local agencies can work together to make a difference.

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26 Ibid27 Edwards, RT, Ceilleachair, A, Bywater, T, Hughes, DA and Hutchings, J “Parenting Programme for Parents of Children at Risk of Developing Conduct Disorder: Cost Effectiveness Analysis” in BMJ no 334 (2007), pp682-68228 Sanders, MR, Calam, R, Durand, M, Liversidge, T and Carmont, S “Does Self-directed and Web-based Support forParents Enhance the Effects of Viewing a Reality Television Series Based on the Triple P Positive Parenting Program?” in Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry no 49 (2008), pp924-93229 Montgomery, P, Bjornstad, G and Dennis, J “Media-based Behavioural Treatments for Behavioural Problems inChildren” in Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews no 1 (2006)30 Hutchings, Bywater, Daley, Gardner, Whitaker, Jones, Eames and Edwards, op cit; Hutchings, Bywater, and Daley, op cit; Edwards, Ceilleachair, Bywater, Hughes and Hutchings, op cit


The message from rigorous real-life trials is clear: there are many effective parentinginterventions, based on relevant evidence from randomised controlled trials. These needto be disseminated widely among staff who work with parents, so they can reach parentswho are most vulnerable. They need to be delivered at times and in ways that parentswant. Staff need high-quality training and supervision, fully backed by managerial support, in order to do this. Further trials of effectiveness are needed to make sure theinterventions work when taken to scale, or when they are used for universal prevention.

Many of these vital activities are being carried out by the Parenting Academy in England.And individual local authorities – such as the London Borough of Hackney – are developingcoherent parenting strategies, funded through regeneration grants. However, the fact stillremains that provision on the ground is patchy, and that huge amounts of public moneyare spent on untested interventions. This is wasteful and unnecessary in a field where wehave so much evidence. One reason for this is that many practitioners and policy makersare not aware of the strength of this evidence base – which is stronger than in any otherarea of child and family policy. When we know this much, then we owe it to vulnerablechildren, and to taxpayers, to give families the best.

Key features of effective parenting programmes Learning processes:• are structured around key social learning principles and activities;• are based on practice and rehearsal of new skills, especially home practice;• use discussion and demonstration of how parents’ feelings and behaviour influence

children; and• involve a collaborative approach as vital – therapist and parents negotiate goals and

methods, based on parents’ own needs and problems.

Learning content – parents learn strategies to:• build positive relationships through play;• encourage good behaviour;• set clear rules and expectations;• discourage problem behaviour;• avoid harsh punishment; and • manage their own stress over parenting.

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Chapter 6

Educational mobility, attitudesand aspirations during the primary school years

Dr Lee Elliot Major, Research Director at the Sutton Trust


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Educational mobility, attitudes and aspirations during the primary school years

Parents from the higher social classes are twice as likely to believe their child will go onto achieve a university degree, compared with parents from the lower social classes. Sutton Trust and Treasury research, January 2007

Right now, in primary schools up and down the country, the children of the millenniumwill be emulating the same upward and downward paths of educational mobility thathave set the future life trajectories of children for generation upon generation. Those children from low-income backgrounds who performed so well in tests at age two are, byage six or seven, overtaken in the rankings by previously less able children from higher-income families. In modern times at least, it has always been this way.

These patterns of inequality were shocking enough when revealed for children born in1970 – a generation ago. But we now know that the same trends are being played out bytoday’s generation of youngsters. Research commissioned by the Sutton Trust on the millennium cohort showed that these patterns have not changed in 30 years: parentalbackground, not individual talent, is the dominant force driving children’s outcomestoday. The rising and falling academic fortunes of well-off and poor children during theearly years remains one of the clearest and most compelling findings showing how loweducational and social mobility manifests itself in modern Britain.

While hugely depressing, these findings at least helped to demolish one of the major misconceptions trotted out to defend flat-lining social mobility in Britain. Some haveargued that low mobility simply highlights the natural accrual of ability among those inthe top echelons of society. Merit has accumulated through generations and generationsof good genes and upbringing – so goes the theory, at least. Is it that surprising, or unfair,that the offspring of high-earning parents themselves go on to do so well in life?

The tragic story of fledgling talent that shines brightly but fades by the time children arebarely getting familiarised with primary school illuminates just how crucial the family andhome surroundings are in shaping and developing talent. Environment matters. And anyway, if genes did explain nearly everything, why is it the case that in all other advancedcountries, the background of parents does not matter as much in predicting their children’s achievements in adulthood as it does in the UK?

What can be done during the primary school years to arrest these seemingly unstoppableforces that drive educational inequalities so early in life? Needless to say, there will not be


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one magical solution, but a cocktail of policies and interventions working together thathave the potential to reduce the class achievement gap. Ideally, these should also connectwell with pre-school and post-primary policies that will not be discussed here.

Here I will focus on a few interventions that the Sutton Trust believes are showing realpromise in changing the attitudes and aspirations of children aged five to 11 and of theirparents. These are delivered alongside a range of initiatives aimed directly at raisingattainment or basic skills.

Three principles underpin these interventions. The first is that we need to recognise thatdifferent strategies are required to engage with children and families facing the particularchallenges of living in poverty. The second is that we must aim to involve parents wherever possible and practical in primary education. The third is that it is never too earlyto plant the seeds of future higher-education possibilities in the minds of children. Whilethese may not seem controversial ideas, they are far from embedded in current practicein schools.

Targeting disadvantaged pupils The Sutton Trust has welcomed proposals recently published by the government thatwould for the first time set statutory targets for local authorities on the attainment of children in receipt of free school meals. Eligibility for free school meals has become the standard (if not totally reliable) way to distinguish children from poor backgrounds; however, the government has up to now shied away from specific targeting of thesepupils, for fear of stigmatising children from poor households.

Targets are one thing; what about actual interventions? One scheme that may help is aprogramme called A Framework for Understanding Poverty (FW4UP), used widely byschools in the United States but relatively unknown and unproven in the UK. The SuttonTrust has, with Reading local authority, recently supported a pilot training scheme forteachers that is based on the programme.

At the heart of the FW4UP framework is an attempt to make explicit the hidden rules usedby the different classes. It suggests that class-based misunderstandings arise in schools,where middle-class teachers are often teaching poor pupils. The scheme enables teachersto understand the habits, beliefs and behaviours that exist in many poor families – so theycan recognise the obstacles that such children face. Poor pupils, meanwhile, learn the hidden rules of the middle class to succeed in school. These may include how to speak in a more formal style, or how to reduce impulsive behaviour (particularly physical retaliation).


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The framework is not without its critics, lambasted by academics as being insufficientlyinformed by research evidence about poverty, and seen by many as oversimplifying thecauses of poverty and low achievement. But teachers involved in the training reported an“Aha!” experience – a shift in understanding. Many said it confirmed what was knownintuitively already from years of teaching. The framework was seen by some teachers asan empowering force to legitimise the strategies they already deploy to teach classes of pupils from a range of backgrounds.

Discussions are now under way to develop ways of combining these insights with existinggovernment resources already available to schools, to provide practical ways of improvingthe learning of those children from poor backgrounds. It is early days, but some believethat this approach could be used to improve language development during the first yearsof primary school – the critical phase providing the platform for learning in later years. A major challenge, however, for the programme will be to avoid negative stereotypes of working-class culture, or value judgments about those living in poverty.

Engaging parentsAnother traditional no-go area for government policy is parenting. In the last year or sothe government has unveiled a series of well-intentioned schemes to boost school linkswith parents and the home environment. Yet one wonders whether one day, in the not sodistant future, these will be looked upon as the first crude and tentative attempts toaddress what is, after all, the core education challenge. (Saying all this, we should allremain acutely conscious of not laying all of society’s ills at the gates of primary schools,or telling parents how to bring up their children.)

Depending on which school-effectiveness study you refer to, factors outside the schoolaccount for 80% or more of the eventual outcomes for children. But the key question inmany ways for the Sutton Trust is what factors contribute to the gaps in achievementbetween the poorest children and their middle-class counterparts. Put simply, the smallerthis gap, the more educational mobility there will be.

A recent analysis of children now growing up in the US found that parenting style and thehome learning environment explain between a third and a half of the early attainmentgap between children from low-income and higher-income families. And there is littlereason to suggest that the same factors will not be similarly important in explaining theattainment gap among UK children.

Professor Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University, who presented the findings at theSutton Trust’s recent New York summit on social mobility, says that good parenting style


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is about maternal or paternal sensitivity – warmth and nurturing – but also responsive-ness to the particular needs of a child: knowing when the child needs attention and whento be left alone, for instance. Waldfogel believes that good parenting can be learned andadvocates the expansion of proven parenting programmes.

But what about schools themselves? There are a number of simple things that primaryschools can do to strengthen what have been termed “home-school links” – recruitingparents on various bodies in the school and in supporting the work of teachers and classroom support staff. A particular area of concern for the Sutton Trust is ensuring thatparents are involved in activities to make pupils fully aware at the end of primary schoolof the higher-education options open to them later in life.

This may seem a young age to talk about university, but research has indicated that childrenfrom poorer backgrounds think about higher education at a much later stage than theirwealthier counterparts, for whom university was always a given in their family. Moreover,choices made early on during secondary school – subjects and types of qualificationsstudied, for example – have profound impacts on the range of options later on.

In a report commissioned by the government’s National Council for Educational Excellence,the Sutton Trust has now proposed that every primary school should be required to devotea minimum amount of time to university aspiration raising and access work. This wouldinclude general information about university and the requirements of certain types ofcareers, at least one visit to a university campus, and – critically – activities that involveparents. The trust is also developing a package specifically for parents, to inform themabout later higher-education options for their children.

Raising aspirations earlyAt the same time we recognise that, for many children from disadvantaged backgrounds,help from parents to broaden educational horizons is, to put it mildly, an unlikely prospect.In many ways, these children are on their own. How can they be supported?

One of the trailblazers in this area has been the Into University project in west London,which the Sutton Trust helped to develop. The project, initially based at the St Clement &St James Community Centre in Notting Hill, offers the sort of academic and pastoral support that children with middle-class parents take for granted. The scheme providesout-of-school support for children from age seven upwards, building confidence, motivationand self-esteem, and raising aspirations to go on to university.

Into University collaborates with local universities to run open days, while undergraduate


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students visit the centre to mentor children. Focus weeks, bringing together children of allages to work on a single project, culminates in a visit to a university where the childrenreceive their “degree certificates”. The scheme has recently been established in Brent andLambeth as well, with an aim to have 11 new centres opened by 2015, creating an IntoUniversity network throughout deprived areas of London.

The Sutton Trust meanwhile has also supported the Children’s University, which offersthose enrichment activities – visiting theatres, museums, sports centres, libraries and thelike – that can be just as important as school lessons in nurturing the development ofyoung children. Activities for children in the age range from seven to 14 in deprived areastake the form of modules, covering the arts, sports, sciences and humanities, and are delivered after school, at weekends or during holidays. The Children’s University is expandingits work with an aim to be a truly national organisation in the next few years.

ConclusionAll these schemes may just help to change the direction of travel for some of those children now on downward paths of educational and social mobility. Any young talentthat is nurtured rather than lost is not only a great success for that individual but also aboon for society as whole, generating both economic and social benefits. At the sametime, no one should underestimate the extent of the struggle ahead if we are to break theintergenerational cycle of educational inequality that manifests itself so clearly during the primary school years.


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Chapter 7

Tomorrow begins today – bridging the gap between thefortunate and the forgotten

Charlotte Leslie, Editor of Crossbow and of the Bow Group’s Invisible Nation series, and Chris Skidmore, Former Chairman of the Bow Group


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Tomorrow begins today – bridging the gap between the fortunate and the forgotten

Some 16% of pupils do not make any progress at all in maths between the ages of sevenand 11 … more than a fifth of 14-year-old pupils eligible for free school meals have areading age of nine … or below.

Pupils who started school in 1997, aged four, took their GCSEs this year. The results? In2008 over half of all pupils did not obtain five good GCSEs including English and maths.Vast numbers of these pupils did not even come close: 137,000 did not gain a single C grade this year; 76,000 of these, or one in eight pupils overall, did not gain anythingmore than an E grade at GCSE.

And this is only a fraction of the picture. We reveal the educational black holes that stillexist in this country, and the enormous gulf that still tragically divides privilege frompoverty in neighbourhoods that geographically may sometimes be just yards apart.Ultimately, we trace this inequity back to its beginnings, where life chances are won or lost – the primary school.

First, it is worth shining a light on the true nature and extent of the challenge that facesus. It is a misconception to believe that the long tail of underachievement in our schoolsis limited to the 638 schools that have been identified and labelled as “failing” – there areforgotten pockets that remain ignored and unrecognised: recent analysis has shown thatthere are “black spot” areas in the country where just 3% of pupils gain five good GCSEs.

And despite a decade of talking about the mission to reduce the gap between rich andpoor, the correlation between such extreme levels of educational failure and povertyremains stark: only a quarter of pupils in the 10% most deprived areas are gaining fivegood GCSEs including English and maths, compared with almost 70% in the 10% leastdeprived areas; and, at ward level, between 1997 and 2006 the percentage of pupilsachieving five GCSEs of any grade has actually fallen in 695 areas across the country.1 Thedivide between the fortunate and the forgotten remains as severe as it has ever been.

Looking at the reasons for this, it becomes clear that educational failure today is a symptom of educational neglect that stems from far back in a pupil’s earliest years at primary school over the past decade. Research has shown how a child’s mind is beingmoulded from the moment it is born. We now know how from 22 months of age the

1 Skidmore, C, Cuff, N and Leslie, C Invisible Children (Bow Group, 2007)


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divergent paths of the richest and poorest pupils begin to set and how several years later the mould has begun to cement – shaped by primary schools and primary schoolteachers across the country.

Statistically speaking, the pervasive link between achievement at primary school andachievement at GCSE is well established. Over 70% of pupils who reached level 4 in keystage two tests in 1998 obtained five good GCSEs in 2003. By contrast, of pupils who didnot reach the accepted benchmark at the end of primary school, just 14% went on toobtain five good GCSEs. And, worryingly, even today, 40% of pupils leave primary schoolwithout gaining the expected level in the three Rs. From what we know, their primaryschool start has already severely damaged their chances of educational fulfilment beforethey reach their 11th birthday. Put bluntly, we know that primary school is where lifechances are forged or lost.

It seems clear that any government looking to raise its game on the OECD tables, any localauthority, or any school, hoping to climb the national league tables, and ultimately anyparent concerned for a child’s future attainment, should look to primary school as thearena in which a child’s success is determined. And yet the policy focus of governmentsto date has been to place the greatest emphasis simply on the outcome of a pupil’s educational achievement: GCSE grades. This has caused its own problems as schools chase ever higher places on league tables, but it has also helped hide the single greatest influence on the GCSE grades upon which all the focus rests: the performance of primary schools across the country today.

While the national media – and the government – focus upon the number of secondaryschools that are classed as failing, little attention has been paid to primary schools thatshould be considered in the same terms. A massive 4,651 primary schools have beenjudged “satisfactory” by Ofsted – a label that has been branded by the head of Ofsted asmeaning “not good enough”.

In 3,655 primary schools less than 50% of pupils achieve level 4+ in reading, writing andmathematics.2 Additional analysis shows that in 3,400 primary schools, more than 30% ofpupils do not reach the basic level in maths; in 567 primary schools, fewer than half ofpupils reach this level. Translating this to a child’s school-lifetime, consider this: at keystages one and two, some 16% of pupils do not make any progress at all in maths betweenthe ages of seven and 11. Mathematically speaking, that’s four years of part of the mostfertile stage of their development more or less wasted.

2 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080402/text/80402w0019.htm#08040272001943


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There is an urgent need to redirect the policy focus, because the situation shows no signof righting itself. And it is the poorest areas that have taken the brunt of the decline instandards. Some 60% of 11-year-old pupils eligible for free school meals taking their key stagetwo tests do not obtain the accepted level in the three Rs. Indeed, since 1997, the percentageof pupils achieving the accepted level in maths has fallen back in one in eight wards.

This has meant that the attainment gap between the most disadvantaged and the mostaffluent pupils has grown ever wider. In 39 local authorities, the gap in achievement atkey stage two maths between pupils that are entitled to free school meals and those thatare not has increased or frozen; these include the most deprived local authorities on theindex of deprivation: Liverpool, Hackney, Tower Hamlets.

But it is not just in test results that the problems are apparent. It is not surprising thatdepressed test results correspond with increased behavioural problems. Truancy is rising inprimary schools; this year the number of persistent absentees in primaries has risen fromjust under 74,000 to over 81,000. The link between primary school truancy and achieve-ment is a strong one: in schools where pupils average fewer than 7.5 days’ absence a year,88% of pupils reach level 4 in key stage two maths. But this drops to just 62% in schoolswhere average absence is more than 15 days.3

Once again, deprivation appears to be a major factor. Recent figures have shown that 44%of persistent truants in primary schools are free school meals pupils.4 The problem is thesame for exclusions at primary school. Pupils from primary schools in the poorest 10% ofsocial areas (based upon the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index) are nine timesmore likely to receive a fixed-period exclusion than those in the highest 10%.5

If there is any national challenge, it must involve recognition that to improve standardsin all our schools we must start by improving standards in the thousands of primaryschools that are letting pupils down almost before the race begins. All pupils must be ableto meet the minimum standard of reading by the time they leave, aged 11. For if they havenot learned to read, they will not be able to read to learn.

This year alone, 226,783 pupils did not reach the government’s expected level in reading,writing and arithmetic. This persistent toleration of failure at such an early stage in apupil’s school career must end. Eradicating primary school illiteracy and meeting this challenge head on must be our primary focus, because by the time these pupils reach

3 http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/schoolattendance/truancysweeps/index.cfm4 http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080421/text/8021w0061.htm 5 Table 19 at: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000793/SFR14_2008TablesAdditional24July.xls


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secondary school the widening gap of educational failure between the poorest and richest pupils has become deeply entrenched, and as pupils progress it only becomes more pronounced.

Following the same group of pupils through each stage at school reveals the nature ofhow the fortunate pull away from the forgotten. In 2002, at the end of key stage two(aged 11), the attainment gap between 11-year-olds who were and who were not eligiblefor free school meals in reaching the expected level was 26 points for English, 16 pointsfor maths and 10 points for science.6 In 2005, for the same pupils aged 14, this gap hadgrown to 27 points for English, 27 points for maths and 30 points for science.7 And in2007, by the time pupils came to take GCSEs, only 21.1% of pupils eligible for free schoolmeals gained five good GCSEs including English and maths, compared with 49% of otherpupils – a gap of nearly 28%.8

At the same time, the rate of persistent truancy and exclusion among boys, and the mostdisadvantaged in particular, takes a remarkable rise. In secondary school, persistent absenteesaccount for 22.2% of all absences. Persistent absentees resident in the 10% most deprivedareas account for 5.2% of all absences, compared with those resident in the 10% leastdeprived areas, who account for just 0.7%. By the time pupils come to sit their GCSEs, 11%of all pupils are barely at school. And beneath the official figures are always the “invisible”children; those who do not actually appear on the school rolls, those who simply disappearfrom the official figures, estimated by the Bow Group to be around 7,000 pupils each year.9

The result is a vicious circle of ever further educational disengagement, between the crucial ages of 11 and 14, trapping the most disadvantaged. Just 37% of pupils eligible forfree school meals aged 14 gained the accepted level – level 5 at key stage three – in thethree Rs. Shockingly, with 65,100 pupils (around one in 10) obtaining the same score orworse in English at key stage three, it is incredible that still more than a fifth (21%) of 14-year-old pupils eligible for free school meals have a reading age of nine (level 3) or below.

Again, it is the poorest who are hit hardest in this vicious cycle. Among the poorest pupils,no fewer than a quarter are excluded from school. Per 100 pupils eligible for free schoolmeals, the number of pupils given an exclusion actually increased from 23% to 24.75% inthe past year. Overall, pupils eligible for free school meals account for 30% (around

6 Hansard, 29 January 2008; key stage two results. The expected level, according to the government, is level 4. See:http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080129/text/80129w0015.htm7 See tables 83-85 at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000671/index.shtml. The expected level is level 5.8 See table 17 at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000759/index.shtml9 Skidmore, Cuff and Leslie, op cit


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10 Leslie, C and Skidmore, C SEN: The Truth about Inclusion (Bow Group, 2008)

100,000) of all fixed-period exclusions – despite making up less than 14% of the schoolpopulation. Since 2003/04 the number of pupils suspended more than once in a singleyear has increased by 24% – up by 17,140 – while the number of pupils suspended 10times or more has rocketed from 310 in 2003/04 to 830 in 2006/07.

These figures suggest that we risk sleepwalking into a discipline and behaviour crisis inmany schools. Little wonder, then, that pupil referral units – where children are generallysent when schools cannot cope with them – are experiencing rocketing populations. Thenumber of pupils being educated in these institutions has more than doubled since 1997,from 7,740 to a new high of 16,010 in 2008.

An alarming percentage of this population rise in pupil referral units is accounted for bychildren with special educational needs. Ofsted has described pupil referral units as the“least appropriate” settings for pupils diagnosed as having special educational needs, yet67% of pupils in these units have such needs. This rise coincides with the closure of special schools, the number of which has, for the first time, dipped below a thousand,resulting in 9,000 fewer special school places.10

Can it be any wonder that children who have left primary school at 11 unable to readproperly will not be able to cope with sitting in lessons they have not been given the reading ability to understand? Thousands of children who have been kicked out of themainstream education system into pupil referral units have special educational needs –but for many, their special need was to be taught to read and count properly at the mostimportant stage in their development.

The sheer size of the pupil referral unit population, the rising epidemic of truancy and suspensions, and the massive rate of exclusions from pupil referral units themselves – at a massive 55% of the population of these units – suggests that despite the best of intentions, not every child has mattered: or, at least, they have not mattered as much as a headline statistic of rising attainment of five A*-C grades at GCSE.

These children have been let down badly. In the vital race to make up for lost time for thissecondary school generation, we must not forget why they are facing the challenges theyare today. Every child does matter – and that includes the class of 2015. Their GCSE resultsare possibly being determined in primary schools today. If we are serious about narrowingthe gap between the educational chances of rich and poor, the fortunate and the forgotten,we must focus on improving our primary schools. Tomorrow begins today.


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Conclusions

• Graham Allen MP, Chair of One Nottingham and Labour MPfor Nottingham North

• John Bercow MP, Conservative MP for Buckingham

• Jean Gross, Director of the Every Child a Chance Trust


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Conclusion 1: the case for localismGraham Allen MP, Chair of One Nottingham and Labour MPfor Nottingham North

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.Thomas Jefferson, 1826

This important collaboration between the Smith Institute and the Centre for Social Justicehas taken as its theme the importance of intervention in the primary years to break the cycle of social disadvantage by developing children’s ability to communicate, their literacy and numeracy skills, their social and emotional skills, and their aspirations. Theauthors have made the strongest possible case for primary years intervention in order topre-empt massive problems in later life.

In my educationally underachieving constituency, I see daily evidence of the need for urgentaction, ranging from the secondary school head teacher who told me that 95% of youngpeople arrive at his school with a reading age below 11, to having the highest teenagepregnancy rate in Western Europe. We have seen from a number of distinguished con-tributors how important it is that early intervention is taken on from the under-fives intothe vital primary years. I look forward to our next volume being about early interventionin the secondary years in order to complete the virtuous 0-18 intergenerational cycle.

We are attempting to apply these ideas practically in Nottingham, investing in a dozenblueprint interventions, starting with the family/nurse partnership of intensive health visiting and nursing for every single mother who needs it, continuing through Sure Startand children’s centres that help children with impoverished spoken language, childrenwho cannot read or write or understand numbers, on to parents who need help throughparenting programmes such as Incredible Years and children who need teaching in socialand emotional aspects of learning throughout their whole school life.

In the primary age group, school is of course important and everything that can be doneat school should be done. However, as Dr Lee Elliot-Major of the Sutton Trust points out,factors outside school account for at least 80% of children’s outcomes. Hence, preparingour children to be effective parents in later life is the greatest investment that society can make in itself and its future.

At the heart of this effort is the creation of good parents. Of course, we must bring forward appropriate remedies to help today’s poor parents, as Professor Frances Gardnerof the University of Oxford eloquently underscored. However, it is incumbent upon those


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of us who aspire to govern to make sure we are putting in place the policies to create thegood parents of tomorrow long before they even have their first child.

In effect, we need not only to teach age-appropriate parenting skills for teenagers and thoseat primary level, but also to see today’s toddlers and babies as the parents of the future whorequire the full set of social and emotional skills, which will ultimately be relevant to raisingchildren of their own. Most of us do this already in our own families, and we need to helpensure it is done in every family. Good parenting must be a central and sustained social valuein the UK and not some “nice to have” add-on loitering at the softer end of policing policy.

Where these life skills are absent, especially in an emotionally deprived area like my constit-uency, they have to be rigorously taught and tested. They are at least as important as anythingelse on the curriculum, including literacy and numeracy – indeed, they are the prerequisiteof all such attainment. However, if in areas like mine they are to be taught effectively, thenhead teachers and their staff have to be given the space and encouragement to do so.Secondary school heads more than anyone realise the fundamental problems that need tobe addressed. Yet all too often head teachers in challenging areas are the ones being mostcompelled to address the priorities of the centre, ahead of those of the locality.

In my experience, central priorities invariably address the symptoms of failure – for example,by aiming to increase achievement of five A*-C grades at GCSE – rather than its causes.The only excuse for our highly centralised politics would be that it can deliver and set outa long-term strategy, fund it and stick with it. After 30 years trying centrally imposed initiatives, we must conclude that the evidence base for success is exceptionally thin. Were central government “help” to be a One Nottingham project, we would have pulledits funding many years ago.

Excellent innovations have taken place in this field: some because of the incredible hardwork of government ministers and national and local officials; others because of the liberationand release that was given to our political system by the creation of the devolved assemblyin Wales and the parliament in Scotland. One day soon we will optimise the creativityelsewhere outside Whitehall and free up the English regions and innovative local councilssuch as Nottingham to produce handcrafted early intervention answers to their specific localproblems. It will become more evident that driving local objectives by centrally devisedtargets and well-meaning short-term goals actually undermines sustainable progress.

Of course, there will always be a need for immediate programmes to help deliver earlyrelief, but patch and mend is not a strategy. The economic crisis will mean that the centre may – despite itself – have to look at long-term financing and independent local


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delivery as ways forward. One Nottingham, despite being hamstrung by poor funding andcarrying a deadweight of central targeting, plan making, strategising and visioning, hasnone the less pulled together local partners that have performed miracles in pioneeringNottingham as “Early Intervention City”. Yet even here, without a broader nationallyagreed strategy, outposts like this require a massive daily renewal of energy to ensure thatthe default position does not swim back over all the progress made.

Jean Gross rightly pointed out in an earlier chapter that some local initiatives have notworked. Unfortunately, the 1,000 local flowers bloomed in very low-quality soil. For themto continue to thrive, they have to be part of a comprehensive strategy drawn from asmall group of successful, evidence-based interventions funded for long-term change and not short-term box ticking. If there were instant remedies, they would have been implemented long ago. The responsibility of central government, especially in our highlycentralised political culture, is to lay out a platform for the long term and stick with it,even when the electoral cycle and a vociferous media demand instant returns.

Without a broad political and social consensus, it will be impossible to sustain the long-termpolicies that can break the intergenerational cycle of deprivation and underachievement.

That is why Iain Duncan Smith and I, having authored Early Intervention: Good Parents, GreatKids, Better Citizens with the warm wishes of all parties, are now pursuing the promisemade in our publication to try to build an all-party consensus around early intervention.We do not pretend that this will eliminate all differences, but we should be looking for the95% that we can agree upon on early intervention, rather than the 5% where we disagree.

We took our message to the Labour and Conservative party conferences. By the time thispublication is printed, Iain and I will have met with the leaders of the three main politicalparties as part of our effort to ensure that early intervention is in all party manifestos at the next election.

Most of our seven key proposals for government, found at the conclusion of EarlyIntervention: Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens, are echoed again in this volume.We are both aware of the political positioning that goes on in British politics. However, weare equally conscious that unless we take the risks necessary to build a consensus thenvital policies can come and go with the tides of electoral fortune. Making a decent society for all our children is too important for that.

As the contributions from people of all parties and of none have made clear, we are all inthis together.


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Conclusion 2: the case for centralismJohn Bercow MP, Conservative MP for Buckingham

The religion of localism has taken hold of all the major political parties, and the more fundamentalist versions of it threaten to prove not the salvation but the opium of thepeople. Let us begin by looking at the two variants of the localist creed.

First, there is the brand of localism that is driven by a belief in the capacity of “choice” todeliver satisfaction to the consumers of public services. This approach stipulates that ifyou give parents and patients a choice of school or hospital, with money following thechild or patient, poor schools or hospitals will have to improve to attract funds or faceclosure if they fail to improve.

The problem with this approach is that it seeks to apply the principles of the private sector, which lives or dies by them, to the public sector, which can do no such thing. Thereality is that, in the public sector, schools cannot go bust. Moreover, there is no catalystin the form of an impatient shareholder to force a change of leadership with any urgency.Real markets work. Artificial markets do not.

Second, there is the direct democracy version of localism. This theory stipulates that localresidents should elect those responsible for organising local services: primary care trustsin health, and local authorities in education. If they do well, the argument goes, we canre-elect them. If they do badly, we turf them out at the subsequent election.

This simplistic approach contains at least two obvious flaws. One is that authorities, unencumbered by centrally imposed duties, will march to the populist tune, seeking tocater to majority concerns and neglecting those of vulnerable but important minorities –such as children with special educational needs or people requiring mental health services.The other flaw in the argument is that minorities, if upset that their needs remain unmet,cannot kick out the unresponsive local authority because they do not have the electoralmuscle to do so.

In short, the market and direct democracy versions of localism highlighted above will simply fail to serve those who require a guarantee of early intervention to overcome disadvantage and to fulfil their potential.

Of course, it is easy enough to see why people complain about central government – itworks too slowly, it imposes bureaucratic burdens of form filling, and it sometimes doesnot understand that different communities have different problems requiring different


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solutions. Similarly, it is easy enough to see why people favour local solutions – they canoften be devised and implemented more quickly, they are less bureaucratic and they canbe tailored to local circumstances.

These arguments are all sound – however, they are not arguments for removing centralgovernment from the scene altogether, but rather for defining its role carefully and ensuring that there is a complementary partnership with the localities. If a service is toreceive some funding from government, it will both have to be, and potentially benefitfrom being, the subject of some government rules, guidance or framework. If we acceptthat this is both commonplace and proper across the public service piece, the argumentfor a pure go-it-alone localism promptly collapses.

Nowhere is the argument that central government must have a seat at the table morestarkly illustrated than in the field of children’s services. Where the service straddles thedivide between health and education providers, the centre has to set some ground rulesif sheer anarchy, and the accompanying postcode lottery, are to be avoided.

Take speech and language services. Primary responsibility lies with the local NHS, but the special educational needs code of practice makes clear that where the NHS fails to provide the service, ultimate “responsibility” for securing and funding speech and language therapy for pupils with special needs falls to the local authority. The point hereis not that this arrangement is perfect, but that parliament has rightly taken a view on thesubject. Speech, language and communication services necessarily involve education andhealth providers alike.

Effective joint commissioning is required to cater to the needs of children and young people. Both local authorities and primary care trusts must commit to such commission-ing. Both must devote resources to it. Both must work to identify outcomes and the means to deliver them. Yet in all too many areas of the country, neither the localauthority nor the primary care trust is kick starting the process and, realistically, they willdo so only if the law, guidance or funding arrangement developed by central governmentobliges or incentivises them to do so. It might be bossy, entail the imposition of targetsand constrain the discretion of local agencies, but it will very probably be a bossiness, target or constraint that parents of children waiting for vital therapy will heartily welcome.

Take the still more serious case of a person afflicted by a condition such as cerebral palsy,who needs a communication aid in order to express his or her hopes, fears, wishes orneeds. From 2002 until 2006, the Communication Aids Project provided £5 million perannum of ring-fenced funding for expert assessment, communication equipment and


training for school-aged children. It was always designed as a short-term programme andministers hoped that local authorities would then create viable local or regional models ofprovision. They have not done so, almost certainly because there was not a critical massof local parents or professionals demanding that such provision should be a priority forhard-pressed budgets with other strong claims upon them.

About 15 local authorities have service-level agreements with the specialist communica-tion centres in order to meet the needs of those who depend upon communication aids.Most authorities have no such agreements and no dedicated funding for communicationaids. It is not a commissioning priority, and parents who want funding for communicationequipment have to wage Kafkaesque battles to obtain it. Once again, ring-fenced fundingand an element of central prescription in the form of minimum standards or a core offerwould not go amiss.

In truth, we should cease to behave as though there is a great intellectual battle betweencentrifugal and centripetal forces in which one must emerge as victor and the other asvanquished. The reality is more prosaic. We need both – central guidance and fundingaccompanied by local know-how and initiative. In other words, what we need is a partnership. Such a partnership, like almost any other, will involve tensions, prove fractious and require some give and take. Yet the partnership must survive and prosper,because our children need both partners and the partners need each other.

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Conclusion 3Jean Gross, Director of the Every Child a Chance Trust

Once upon a time, a man was standing on a bridge. As he looked down, he saw a bodyfloating in the water beneath him. He rushed down and managed to pull the body outand resuscitate the person. Next day the same thing happened … and this time not justone body, but many. He shouted for help, and soon there were four or five people helpinghim pull the bodies out and get them breathing again.

Yet still the bodies kept coming, and being pulled out. There were too many to cope with.“Go down the river and get more help,” said the people to the man. He set off, but thenstopped. “No,” he said, “I’m not going to fetch more help to fish them out. I’m going to goupstream to find the b… who is pushing them in.”

This monograph, like its predecessor Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens, has shownus how we can go upstream and tackle at source the problems of our most difficult andfractured communities. It has made the case for tackling those problems in children’s primary school years, as well as in the pre-school period. There may be differing viewsabout how to implement an early intervention policy - how much should be centrallydetermined, and how much left to local choice. But there is total agreement that such apolicy is necessary. Solutions are within our grasp.

Imagine that every £1 spent on the academies programme was matched by £1 spent inthe primary schools feeding into an academy – on structured language programmes, onReading Recovery, on the Numbers Count programme, on the teaching of social and emotional skills, on school-home support workers and on parenting groups. Such a systemwould pay for itself within five years in savings to academy budgets for special needs,behaviour and truancy. It would pay for itself many times over as the children involvedgrow to adulthood. So far, so obvious – but this kind of investment is not happening now.

Politicians can make it happen. In Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens all parties wereasked consider seven simple commitments as they develop their election manifestos. We repeat them here.

1. The manifesto frameworkWe request that a clear commitment to pursue an early intervention strategy should bemade in parties’ election manifestos and that the party leaders should all make anunequivocal public commitment to the intergenerational change that early interventionneeds.


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2. A research baseWe request a commitment that a future UK government commission a long-term studycomparing the development of cohorts of children with and without early intervention toinform the policy as it develops.

3. A national policy assessment centreWe ask for a pledge to create a national policy assessment centre to assess early intervention policies in the UK and to recommend the most robust and sustainable.

4. Local governmentWe request that the Local Government Association, in co-operation with central government, should host an early intervention leaders’ network within the UK.

5. The comprehensive spending reviewTo help place early intervention at the heart of the public policy debate, we ask each partyleader to commit to theming their first comprehensive spending review, the UK’s three-year spending plan, “Early Intervention CSR”, so that steps can be taken now to initiateserious financial reorientation and investment alongside the serious Treasury research andplanning that always precede a CSR.

6. Local early intervention vision for each areaWe request that central government asks every local council and/or local strategic partnership to produce a short early intervention vision for their area, learning from best available practice.

7. A Treasury studyWe urge a modestly funded, multi-departmental study, led by the Treasury and CabinetOffice research, to devise a new form of financial instrument to fund early interventionsustainably by releasing for use now some of the massive future savings that will be generated long term.

These requests are modest and practical. The consequences are potentially transforma-tional. We urge politicians, both local and national, to embrace the evidence-based earlyintervention programmes that are the only sure way to give every child a chance to succeed in life – no matter what their circumstances.


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